Windows 7: Unrecognizable HDDs in Win7?

so,

i've built a new system with an SSD for my system and two ATA HDDs for files, media, docs, libraries, ets. I had been hoping to set them up in a RAID 1 array, but that is neither here nor there, as i can't even get them to show up in the explorer window! that, and i think that my mobo may not support RAID anyway...

the drives *are* present in the device manager, with updated drivers, and reported working fine. i've disabled/enabled, uninstalled/reinstalled, tried different drivers, yet nothing seems to work. i've even tried booting up the BIOS in IDE, RAID, and AHCI modes, none of which have any effect (except for windows not even being willing to boot into RAID mode at all).

so, the drives are powered & installed (connected via SATA), drivers up-to-date, and appear normally in the device manager, BUT they are nowhere to be found in the explorer, or anywhere else where they might actually be useful to me.

i know other folks have had similar problems with other drives, but i have been unable to find a solution online... maybe someone can help?



here's the details:
Mobo - MSI 870A-G54 AM3 AMD 870
CPU - AMD PhenomII @3.0GHz
Ram - 8GB OCZ AMD Black
Vid - MSI R5770 Hawk Radeon
and the offending hard drives are 2x Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS 2TB

Let me know if you need any more specific info to be useful, and i thank everyone ahead of time for any help you can offer!

THANKS!

If your mobo doesn't support RAID, you'll just end up with two separate HDDs to use, which may not be a bad thing (one for file storage, one for backups)

Check the Computer Management Console by going to Start, right-click Computer, and choose Manage.

On the left side, click Disk Management and take a look at what you have.

If your drives are really recognized, they may just not have any partitions on them. By default, HDDs shipped don't have partitions on them.

Here's an example:



Unallocated space will show up in black (I have none in this case). Right click the unallocated space and create a new volume. When you go through the steps, you should have a new drive in My Computer. :P