Win7 and the missing Hard drive

So my wife's computer decided to take a dump on her the other day and she really needs her files off the backup drive since all of her lessons are on them. I pulled the drive and hooked it into my machine so that everything could be accessible to her.

Both machines were running win7 64bit and the drive is an IDE drive. My machine has a pair of SATA drives in it that are fine, but for whatever reason this IDE drive is not found at all by windows. The bios sees it fine, but as far as windows is concerned it doesn't exist. It must be something in a bios setting or a driver issue because I know the drive is good, formatted, and working. I am just stumped at the moment.

The drive isn't found in diskpart, nor drive management. All of the settings in the bios are to IDE. The only difference between this drive and the others in my machine is it's an older IDE drive versus they are newer SATA. The motherboard is a gigabyte ep45-ud3p. I've also tried other old IDE drives I have laying around and they aren't picked up in windows either.

I am just feeling a bit stumped at the moment. Thanks.

Hi Trent,

Can you verify the IDE pin setting on that HD? Make sure it's not missing the jumper on the back of the HD.

You might try booting from a live Linux CD. Then see if it recognizes the drive or not.

Good luck,
-JT

I ended up sorting it out like 5 minutes after I posted this. For whatever reason I had to set the controller to ahci and then it recognized the drive right away. Everything is kosher now, got what was needed off the drive and the wife happy.

Cool, glad to hear it's working out.

Trent said:

the wife happy.

Click to expand...

That's the important part.