Secondary Hard disk not being shown or detected in My computer

sunny1800 · 26 Aug 2010

I have just switched and upgraded to windows 7 from windows XP...the hard disk/drives C:/ D:/ and E:/ show up normally in My Computer but the hard disks and partitions drives F:/ G:/ and H:/ do not show up....only after the PC is re-started do they appear and they after leaving the PC idle for a while or overnight it again disappears from My Computer. Is this a Power Management setting? The Drives F,G and H are secondary hard disks in the SATA slot. My IT engineer from my office has tried changing the cable connecting these hard disks but that does not seem to solve the problem.

Pls advise and help.

Mellon Head · 26 Aug 2010

Sometimes if drives are set to sleep after a certain amount of time, they go off line and disappear. Used to happen with an old PATA drive I had and I thought it was broken, but it wasn't.

Night Hawk · 26 Aug 2010

Welcome to the Seven Forums! sunny1800

Mellon Head summed that one up nicely there. If the power plan is set to turn off the drives after so many minutes(20 minutes default) the volume(s) on the drive become inaccessible. For ready access all the time the option to create a new custom plan or simply going with the performance plan option would be to see the hard drive time reduced to 0 minutes or "never".

sunny1800 · 02 Sep 2010

@Night Hawk- I tried to what u've mentioned and reduced the "turn of hard disk after time" to 0 = "never" and the sleep after time as well to 0 ="never" but it still didnt help. The cable connecting the hard disk has also been changed thinking it might be faulty but it still does not help. What could be the problem here now? Please advise.

Night Hawk · 02 Sep 2010

Besides the power plan settings are the partitions/drives F, G, H all NTFS or another file system by chance? If Fat or exFat volumes that could also why they are not seen right away from the need to go into the Disk Management tool and reinitialize them each wake up!

Apparently the drives themselves especially if external wouldn't be seen automatically. Since the drives are plugged into the sata ports directly however the partition types/formats are the thought as to why they remain asleep.

kituhi1234 · 03 Sep 2010

check for the secondary HDD settings in BIOS....

Night Hawk · 03 Sep 2010

The bios settings would be for AHCI, ide, or settting an array. That would have an immediate effect. The drives are remaining in sleep mode status once the system is active again suggesting the energy saving feature now seen in 7 is in effect.

The fast solution would be simply shutting everything down overnight and starting up fresh in the morning. With the drive setting at "never" you wouldn't expect to have any further problems with fresh startup on a daily basis.

jimbo45 · 03 Sep 2010

Hi there
This method often works -- especially plugging in USB disks to laptops.

Go to control panel ==>adminitrative tasks==> computer management ==>storage

When you see the disks you'll probably see your HDD with no partition letter against it.

Just click change Drive letter --choose one and your disk should now be viewable

I'm not sure what causes this but it seems to occur on a drive I've connected to different physical machines probably with different drive letters. Maybe the volume info is getting hosed up. I just don't know.

Anyway this method has worked 99.9% of the time when I've had this problem - the 0.O1% of the time was when the disk drive was broken - not surprising as I dropped it on a hard stone floor.

Cheers
jimbo

Night Hawk · 03 Sep 2010

That will trash a drive real fast! HDD Regenerator time for you! jimbo45 if you can repair it.

The change of the drive letter of course is one way to see a drive initialize itself.

When first adding a new drive on and paritioning/formatting it it still won't be seen until the add new volume wizard is brought up and you then select the next available drive letter. Once you open any explorer window the drive is then in plain sight with the letter you selected.

For an existing volume that "fell asleep" the change should wake it up. That will also mean doing this on a regular basis and can effect any scheduled backups as well as other things.

grimreaper665 · 03 Sep 2010

Is the drive detected at all in the BIOS? If not, re-seat your power connection on the hard drive, or better yet, change to another connector completely, if available.