SOLVED Windows 7 doesn't see my storage drive

[Alaric]

I flashed the most current BIOS and it seems to work, as far as everything else goes. And I had the same problems with the HDD in a completely different rig. I would lean towards blaming the HDD, but my set up is wonky about my boot drive, as well. And the fact that two separate W7 installs have the same issue, and both share the inability to recognize TV tuner cards that both rigs previously had zero problems with. I think M$ broke W7.

 

[Alaric]

Can anyone recommend an external 3.5" USB HDD enclosure or cable adapter? Cheap is good, but I need one that can handle a 4 TB drive. My OS can see USB drives, so I can copy my data before I try a reformat.

 

[Alaric]

Can anyone recommend an external 3.5" USB HDD enclosure or cable adapter? Cheap is good, but I need one that can handle a 4 TB drive. My OS can see USB drives, so I can copy my data before I try a reformat.

Have one coming from Amazon. Hoping that fixes it. Fingers crossed. LOL

 

[knoober]

Have one coming from Amazon. Hoping that fixes it. Fingers crossed. LOL

FWIW: Im not sure that the USB enclosure is a long term solution. Probably good for grabbing your data so you can try some formatting and such, but unless you specifically grabbed one that supports your size drive or got real lucky then you might be in for some more headache. Ask me how I found this out

 

[Alaric]

Yeah, I specifically got one that recognizes drives to 8 TB. Short term is all I'm looking for with it, too. I just want to do a data grab and go with a reformat in W7 and see what's up. If that works, I'll clone my C:\ drive to it, then reformat the SSD and see if I can get everything to show up as AHCI in Explorer. Or at least show up in Explorer. I'm still at a loss to explain my C:\ drive showing up as removable. LOL

 

[Alaric]

And total fail. Windows loaded drivers, said the device was ready to use, and it doesn't show up in explorer and it no longer shows up in Disk Management. Shows in Devices and Printers as a USB device and in Device Manager under disk drives. When I try to populate the volume in the properties tab I get a message stating "Volume information for this disk cannot be found". Acronis won't load now because it thinks I don't have a WD HDD in the system. I'm at a loss. I guess I'll try WD support next. This is starting to get annoying.

 

[LutaWicasa]

Got any other spinners around that ya can pop in there to make sure it's not the enclosure?

 

[Alaric]

The only other SATA drive I have is a failed Seagate. Other than disappearing from Disk Management it is exhibiting the same behavior as when installed in the rig. I should have formatted it as a MBR initially. That might have prevented all this. The part that confuses me most is Windows 10 saw the HDD and I had access to the drive, in the same computer. I may end up having to get yet another drive, install Windows 10 again on it, then save my data from there so I can try a reformat of the problem drive. Sheesh. LOL

It also doesn't show in the BIOS when installed, and neither does my C:\ drive. Think my mobo could be wonky?

 

[LutaWicasa]

So...at some point you had this rig runnin' Win 10.
You hate 10 and dump it (though everything was working etc), do a Win 7 install and all hell breaks loose.
That pretty much sum things up?

 

[Alaric]

LOL. Somewhat. The drives were showing as SCSi in W10, too. But I had access to the HDD in W10. Neither one shows up in my SATA menu in the BIOS, the ODD is the only drive that's behaving 100%. W10 had to go for several reasons, but the need for Media Center was a deal breaker.

 

[LutaWicasa]

Wish I coulda seen a screen of the SCSI thing. All my drives show as SCSI when I check their hardware ids.
You also have the prob of your tuner cards not working, neh? These were working under 10?
Anyhoo...any way this could be a Win 7 install media issue? Don't know what you're using to install with....if it's a home built ISO, you may wanna think about steppin' back and doin' a ground-up rebuild.

 

[Alaric]

Tuner card problem is fixed. It was a separate issue. I had to install the manuf. software suite to get the needed drivers for Media Center. My install DVD is a gen-u-wine MS Windows 7 Pro SP1 x64 DVD. And I still haven't found a reason for the two SATA drives not being visible in the BIOS SATA menu. They show in the boot menu, though.

 

[LutaWicasa]

Yeah...that is odd. When you mentioned that I shutdown and rebooted into bios. All my spinners show in SATA config and the Sammie shows in NVME config. All show somewhere in boot menus.

 

[Alaric]

My boot drive showing as removable in Windows and not as a SATA drive in BIOS is definitely a head scratcher. Do you think it could be a mobo issue?

 

[LutaWicasa]

As bios is a completely separate issue from OS....it don't sound too promising.
When ya had 10 on it had you noticed the drive not showing in bios as well?

 

[Alaric]

I didn't look. The HDD didn't show up in W10 at first, but after a day or so it suddenly appeared in Explorer so I forgot about it. To add to the confusion, I tried the HDD in my old rig and it's semi invisible in that, too. I have access to a W8.1 rig so I may try that tomorrow. I'll probably get a cheap SSD ordered tonight for the just-in-case scenario.

update: Plugged it back in to the SATA port and it's gone from Devices and Printers, but no other changes. Except one. Disk Management shows it as a Dynamic disk now. ??? Also, I installed Recuva hoping it would see the HDD and allow me to save some files. It sees the drive as two drives, and I get a message saying Recuva can't determine the file system type of either disk.

 

[Alaric]

Last update tonight. All drives are showing up in the BIOS SATA menu now. The WD HDD shows up everywhere but Explorer in the Computer tab. I'm going to pull out what's left of my hair and go to bed.

 

[LutaWicasa]

 

[Alaric]

View attachment 183878

As of this morning my C:\ drive is "normal". No longer shows as removable or in Devices and Printers. Selecting "enable" on the hot swap option seems to have changed that

 

[knoober]

Are you familiar with diskpart ? https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc770877(v=ws.11).aspx

CMD > diskpart > list disk > select disk X (where X is the number of your drive) > clean all

My money is on Win10 not being completely gone in some way shape or form (Im a pessimist what can I say?). I think if you can backup your data and run a clean all on your drives then you wont see any more problems. You might be able to get away with "clean" instead of "clean all" (on 4Tb clean all will take a day or so, clean perhaps half the day) but I wouldnt mess around. I dont know how HDD companies feel about it, but I think that if you "clean all" a drive and it doesnt start acting right then the drive is at fault. My .02