New computer and my old hard drives aren't showing up.

Hey so the story is, it was time for an upgrade and I got a barebundle package from Novatech. I installed windows 7 on a brand new hard drive and then afterwards I plugged in my 2 old sata hard drives which were bought at Novatech and when they came with that computer like 3 or 4 years ago they came as two 250gig hard drives merged together.

They are showing up in my computer like this:


Then I googled the problem and I came to this forum :) and somebody had a similar but not the same problem, I thought to cut time I'd show you what my Disk Management looks like:


Does anybody know how I can access those two merged hard drives? Would be so amazing seeing as I have years of photography, games and work on them

Bootup using a live linux distro and check if the data in the hard drives shows up or not. If it does then it is an issue with windows 7, else probably the sectors are corrupt which means there is no possible bay (except opening the hard disk and using a magnetic data reader), which means you have to format your hard disk.

I actually think the problem lies with Disk 1 or E: if you see it says primary partision aswell I think it's something to do with that, I think that Disk 1 and Disk 2 are primary partitions for my old computer. I think the two old hard drives are conflicting with the first one. That's what it looks like because if you look Disk 1 (not 0) says primary partition.

the issue wiht primary partitions come when they are all on a single hard disk.
In that case, you can make upto 4 primary partitions on a single HD. even if you try, you cant make more.
Even I have 3 HDDs and all of then have multiple partitions so having 3 HDDs should not be the problem here, unless they are Seagate.
I have seen this before my self too. Sometimes windows cant read some of the Seagate HDDs if they are connected at the same time. I cant use my seagate ext. without disconnecting the internal Seagate HDD.

Hope it was of some help to you.

Actually, we need more information before we can do much to help you. You stated the 2 250 Gig HDs were merged together, which suggests to me that you had them 'striped' to get 500 gigs of disk space. The problem is, you did not tell us how they were 'merged together'. Also, if it was done with a RAID setup via hardware or via software.

The drawback with an old RAID setup is that when you redo your system, you have the potential of breaking an old raid setup and possibly destroying your old data. More so if the RAID setup was done via the operating system, as the OS is the one that controls how to access those disks for the information and by destroying to OS, there is a high potential of irrecoverable loss of how the RAID Striping was done.

The worst case scenario I can state is that you might have lost all your data, especially if you had Windows 7 try to repartition or redo those drives.

One possible chance you CAN try, but no guarantees you can recover data is to use a Ubuntu Live CD, see if it will see the stripped partitions and then copy said data onto an external drive.

One thing to note for the future, and this is also for other people. You never really want to have a RAID 0 (Two disks 'merged' to make a larger disk) or try to setup a new system and try and keep a RAID 0 Striped set as there is always a chance of accidentally muxing up the data by making wrong choices or the OS having the potential of also messing with the data. You should always backup the data you want from that disk setup to an external setup.

Further more, you really do not want to use RAID 0 setup for 'critical' data. RAID 0 is great for performance, however, striping the Data across multiple disks, while it increases your speed of access, it also increases your chance of data failure if a disk fails due to lack of data redundancy. RAID 0 is best for scratch disk use where you don't care if you lose the data, but in this day and age, most people don't use RAID 0 setups anymore.

Sorry for the late reply, I've just been busy actually trying to find a solution. You guys, I have to say are awesome for being so helpful, even though it's not actually of any use to me Because:

The computer which the two old hard drives were put on died, basically the power supply started cutting off from time to time, I knew that it was going to die out soon anyway. It did eventually but what sucks is that the motherboard K.O'ed at the same time :'( That's why I got a new barebundle machine to put the old hard drives in, and then I found out that if I wanted to install any new O.S that the hard drives would have to be formatted, that's what I don't want to do: Format the drives. I have Yearsssss of work and photography on that stuff, I think I would be really really screwed if I lost all of that, I'm planning to try and sell some of my photos and then work on selling my stuff would be from those files... I got a new hard drive and thought that getting a new hd and new os and then use those two old hard drives combined as like secondary drives. Anyway sounds like I'm really ****ed, I reckon I need to call up the company which I bought the computer from (Novatech) and see if they have a solution to that because I know they still put two hard drives together for complete computers.

there may be another way..
connect your hard drives and in the bios select raid setup for them or whatever mode you used to 'merge' them.
then botup using a linux livecd like ubuntu.
this way you wont have to install any new os and you'll, hopefully, be able to access the data on your hard disks

hope it helps you out..!!!!!