Windows 7: 3 HDDs moved from XP, only one recognised in Win7

Having built a new Win7x64 computer with 1x SSD and 2x Seagate HDDs I then moved 3 nearly identical WD drives from my old Win XP machine to the new one. However although they all show up in device manager and system information only one appears in Disk Management & Windows Explorer.



The drives moved are 500GB Western Digital WD5000AKS full of data. It doesn't matter whether I mount the invisible drives internally or externally (I have a Coolermaster CM690 II Advanced which has an external SATA port on the top).

I've put the invisible drive back in the old XP machine to check it and it still works fine. (It was still powered from the new Windows 7 m/c as I simply rerouted the SATA cable so I know it is receiving enough power.)

Any ideas why one will show and not the others?

It might be do to your mobo limitations. Have you checked out your mobo manual for specifics on how many HDDs you can have connected and in what mode.

It can't be that as I initially tried plugging them in individually to the top port and only one of them worked.

The mb (Asus P8Z77-V) make no mention of limitations. As device manager recognises them but disk management doesn't I suspect a software problem.

Make sure they all have drive letters in Disk Mgmt if shown there.

Install free Partition Wizard
to see if they show up there and have drive letters. If so and you still can't access them then rightclick each to Check File System which may make them readable.

type of drivers ?! if you changed before to dynamic drive you have to delete partion and creat again , also Windows 7 work with NTFS HDD , FAT will not appears .
try pluging 3HDD and instal clean Windows 7 while the 3 HDD are conected

I think you are correct in that they are defined as dynamic drives. Partition wizard showed them as "dynamic " and reported "bad disk".

I'll have to put them back in the old machine to change them as disk mgt can't see them to change to "basic" and the free version of Partition Wizard doesn't provide that functionality. I'm out today so that will have to be a job for tomorrow.

put them back and save ur data in external or another HDD , cause when you convert HDD to basic you have to delete partion and losing data .
good luck

Download, unzip and burn to CD pw422.zip ISO - Windows Live

Boot to convert the Dynamic Disks to Basic. How to convert dynamic disk to basic disk with Partition Wizard?

You'll need to delete all but four Primary partitions or three Primary and unlimited Logical. Any more than this trigger the warning it is about to convert to Dynamic which you apparently ignored.

Dynamic disks are meant to span partitions across multiple HDs'.

Solved
I put the two dynamic disks back into the XP machine, deleted the volume and converted them to basic. I already had the data on my new m/c so that wasn't a consideration.

Interestingly it wouldn't let me convert them when I only put one disk in, saying that the filesystem was still in use. I guess I must have originally added both together and created the dynamic drive using both disks. When I added the second disk it let me convert them. XP didn't seem to mind only one of the disks being present when using explorer which confused me.

Thanks to everyone.