Can't get Windows 7 to find my 2nd hard drive

Welcome to the Seven Forums! sortoffaerygirl

Your problem reminds of what was happening on the last custom case here where one storage kept disappearing while known to be in top working order. The solution was examination of the sata data cable found only slightly lfted up in the port at the board end of it.

The drive was seen in the bios post screen but not even in the Disk Management when it vanished and then returned until going over things like that assuming it could have been a cable gone bad. Sometimes a little dust or dirt will get in there over time from the warm up and cooling off along with the need to clean things up with a can of air cleaner.

First make sure both ends are all the way in. If nothing try another cable to see that's all it is. Generally unless a drive fails completely it's always some little thing like that.

Night Hawk said:

Welcome to the Seven Forums! sortoffaerygirl

Your problem reminds of what was happening on the last custom case here where one storage kept disappearing while known to be in top working order. The solution was examination of the sata data cable found only slightly lfted up in the port at the board end of it.

The drive was seen in the bios post screen but not even in the Disk Management when it vanished and then returned until going over things like that assuming it could have been a cable gone bad. Sometimes a little dust or dirt will get in there over time from the warm up and cooling off along with the need to clean things up with a can of air cleaner.

First make sure both ends are all the way in. If nothing try another cable to see that's all it is. Generally unless a drive fails completely it's always some little thing like that.

Thanks for the response, but as I have already said: I checked the cables. Which means, I have already checked to make sure they were in place, I have swapped them out, cables are not the problem.

Also I have taken the drive out and tested it: it works. The data is there. I worked my way through the BIOS since I made the post and the drive isn't showing up.

With everything checked surprizingly a second look never hurts since everything was in working here too when seeing this same problem only with an internal drive.

The next thing of course for a usb external would be try plugging it into a different usb port in case that one is having a problem. Sometimes the simple change to another port while the first is still good forces Windows to perform a fresh detection of an external drive or device like a flash drive, usb keyboard, or some other external item.

Once Windows has properly detected it again you will want to take another trip into the DM to see it initialize the drive by assigning a drive letter. Then you can verify it took when opening up any explorer window and seeing it appear with that same letter used.

You would do this by first shutting down entirely and unplugging the drive for then starting up normally without it plugged in. Once everything is loaded up you then plug it back in and wait for the new hardware found notification before entering the DM for the next look and providing a drive letter.

Was the drive left with the factory Fat 32 colume on it and simply used or did you reformat it to NTFS at some point? In Vista most drives would need the software installer in order to see the previous version see the Fat volume external drives and even flash drives come with. For 7 simply getting Windows to first detect the drive fresh due to now having Fat support return along with new support for exFat 7 will automatically assign the next available drive letter usually on it's own unless you need to encourage it a little in the DM.

Night Hawk said:

With everything checked surprizingly a second look never hurts since everything was in working here too when seeing this same problem only with an internal drive.

Um... my problem is with an internal drive... there is no USB port to check... and I'm very confused by your response because you say that the problem you described was same the problem only with an internal drive... but it's not the same problem...

The problem you mentioned was the drive showing on the BIOS and not in DM. Here, the drive is showing in neither place.

And again, I say it's the "2nd internal hard drive" at least twice in the post... why are you confusing this with an external? That is just confusing me!

Thanks for the reply.

Cross circuit at this end. sorry! But that can come up on you too since you have external as well as the extra internal drive. For the internal drive situation you would still shut down and then start back once you unplugged that one allowing Windows to load without it being present.

Once loaded fully you then shutdown a second time only to plug it back in and see if Windows will then properly detect as a new drive and install it for you. It seems something may be off in the Windows install itself or simply didn't see a full detection of everything like it should have when you first went to install 7.

If everything is performing normally that can help rule out a bad install of Windows but you may want to run the system file checker tool just the same. Simply type "sfc .scannow" in at the Run command line to get that going for it's quick verification and even repair of any main system files needing it.