Internal disk not correctly recognised - WD velociraptor, Gigabyte

i'm having problems configuring a disk in a brand new, clean windows-7 install. here are some system specifics-

. disk- western digital velociraptor wd6000hlhx
. mobo- gigabyte z77x-ud3h
. bios sata-mode set to ahci [not raid], w/disk connected to sata0 [6gb/s hi-speed sata].
. windows 7 enterprise sp1 x64

the disk is recognized by bios and correctly identified [name & size ok].

the disk is also recognized by windows on a h/w level, but it won't show up in the explorer. windows reports the device is working correctly.

windows disk manager shows the drive, but says it's uninitialized and has no partitions [which is incorrect]. if i try to initialize the drive, windows throws an error saying that it "cannot find the file specified". [which file???]

before connecting the drive to the new machine, i partitioned and formatted the disk under windows xp sp2, giving it 2 partitions [mbr, not gpt] and copying over a boatload of data. obviously none of this appears under windows 7. removing the disk from the new machine and replacing it back in the windows xp machine shows the disk and all data are intact and functional.

i'd like to have windows 7 recognize the disk w/o having to lose the data and start over. is this possible? if so, how would i do that?

[i checked several posts -- e.g., here -- but even though the problem seems identical, the information didn't help.]

any help appreciated.

thanks!

thanks for the help, guys.

ok, i've got some new info.

calling diskpart in an elevated window shows me that the drive is already online.
just for kix, i tried to offline it. i got the same error msg that i got when i tried to initialize it using the disk mgt interface from 'manage computer' -- "cannot find the file specified".

if i list the details of the disk within diskpart, it shows me the disk as read-only, and the disk type is set to 'raid' [which is odd, because i haven't selected raid in the bios].

if i swap the disks, i.e., put the boot disk on the high-speed [6gb/s] controller and the unrecognized disk on the 3gb/s controller, the disk still appears as wonky as ever from the disk mgt widget. HOWEVER, it no longer even appears in diskpart.

one of the utilities included on the mobo driver install disk is 'intel rapid store technology'. when i run this, it's able to get all the info from the disk [serial number, model number, correct disk size, etc.] and shows the disk as being in working order. it also shows the usage as 'unknown'.

i d/l'd the western digital diagnostic tool and ran it against the disk. it says the disk is fine. however, it doesn't list the model number in its list of disk drives.

this situation really has me scratching my head... at this point, i'm even ready to repartition and reformat the disk from scratch [as long as i can end up w/a readable mbr-based partition table in order to put it back into the other machine and copy the files over again] -- but i can't seem to be able to access the disk even to do that.

any other ideas?

thanks
dave

well, the solution to this problem turned out to be fairly simple, but a little counter-intuitive [at least to me...]. the bios config was at fault.

i was poking around in the bios and, remembering that the intel utility said the disk was a raid disk, set the sata device type to 'raid' [it was set to ahci]. this allowed the raid menu to come up on boot, which allowed me to see the disk as part of a raid set and reset it to standard disk, instead of raid. once i did that, everything worked fine -- both partitions visible, no data lost.

i have no clue why the mobo defaulted to setting this disk as a raid disk. seems a little presumptuous to me...

anyway, problem solved now, thanks much for all your help.

cheers
dave