After switching from IDE to AHCI disk requires formatting to be recogn

I reinstalled windows, and went with AHCI for eSata hot swap.

2 of my 6 drives did not appear in my computer.
1 of them I just assigned a drive letter in DM and it is fine.

the other, which was previously working, says it requires initialization, which I did, and assigned a drive letter....
I stopped short of performing a format ( to preserve the data) but it is listed as raw and unaccessable.

I am not sure what to do now as I have a raw drive that I cannot access...which a few hours ago had several hundred gigabytes of data.
the drive in question is a 1tb seagate 7200.11

EDIT: the other thing I did was move the drive from a jmicron controller to an intel controller on the MB.....all 6 drives are now on the intel controller sata ports
thanks

One common solution is to recover the data from the drive to a backup drive, then format the RAW drive, then put the data back.

Raw Recovery: Recover files from Raw Partitions, Hard Disk Drive, Memory card, SD Card. Raw File System Recovery Software.

I don't know that changing SATA from IDE to AHCI is automatically going to require reformatting. I made that change on my desktop and didn't have to do anything.

Maybe the way I did it is what made the difference:
1) Was booting using SATA IDE mode and read about performance improvements using SATA AHCI mode
2) Since my motherboard has two sets of SATA ports which can be configured differently, set the second set of ports to SATA AHCI and connected a SATA CD/DVD drive to that
3) Rebooted Win7, it saw the CD/DVD device and installed the SATA AHCI drivers
4) Shutdown, reconfigured the first set of ports to SATA AHCI, rebooted
5) Win7 worked fine without any changes -- and now, ALL my SATA ports are configured AHCI

mdharrington said:

I reinstalled windows, and went with AHCI for eSata hot swap.

2 of my 6 drives did not appear in my computer.
1 of them I just assigned a drive letter in DM and it is fine.

the other, which was previously working, says it requires initialization, which I did, and assigned a drive letter....
I stopped short of performing a format ( to preserve the data) but it is listed as raw and unaccessable.

I am not sure what to do now as I have a raw drive that I cannot access...which a few hours ago had several hundred gigabytes of data.
the drive in question is a 1tb seagate 7200.11

EDIT: the other thing I did was move the drive from a jmicron controller to an intel controller on the MB.....all 6 drives are now on the intel controller sata ports
thanks

The first thing I found that works when switching over from Native ide to AHCI following a clean install of Windows is getting the Sata/RAID controller drivers for the board on while you are still running in the ide mode. If you switch too soon the drives won't work as they should since the main board is lacking the necessary drivers.

When first getting the present board with it set by default to AHCI I had to switch over to the Native Ide mode and ran it that way for about a year. Following a clean install of 7 last summer and once all drivers were back on again the switch over went as smooth as silk seeing all 4 HDs(internal) mounted as SCSI devices in the extra post screen seen at startup.

When first switching the modes and arriving at the desktop a prompt to restart to finish installing the new hardware was seen to complete the install which simply mounted the drives themselves as SCSI devices. You will want to read through the guide for this just the same. AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista

Once you assigned a letter for the one drive that was seen instantly afterwards you had seen the drive initialized properly. I do that often with usb flash drives as well as a cell phone or external HD in a usb enclosure which allows Windows to mount the volume as a new logical drive. That drive was all set to go there.

For the other one you are having problems with the partition is likely intact while the drive is probably in the "offline" mode when looking at it in the DM. The block on the left side of the volume will indicate online or offline when right clicking on that. If you find it shows offline and set it to online again you may have to go to the menu bar>Actions and select the rescan option before going to change the drive letter again.

In the command you could always try the DiskPart tool there to get it online. You first have to know the Disk number in order to select the right drive there however.

At the command prompt window's prompt:
DiskPart
List Disk
Select Disk #X (X being sub for correct letter)
Online
or
online [noerr] for seeing DiskPart automatically close with an error message. Without the switch the DiskPart tool will simply process the commands without notice of any errors being seen.