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Were these matching HD's originally in a RAID? Is the SATA controller now set to AHCI? Have you tried changing the port? This is the reason we advise disconnecting all other HD's during install.
The preferred setting for install is AHCI on modern hardware which you can still change: AHCI : Enable in Windows 7 / Vista - Windows 7 Forums
You may need to initialize the other HD before it is seen. If it's not showing up in Disk Mgmt can you install it in another Windows PC to see if it shows up there to partition it? If not try Partition Wizard which can sometimes see what Disk Mgmt doesn't.
Have you done all of your Important and Optional Windows Updates? This is highly recommended since only one out of a million Updates is problematic, and Win7 needs to be current for performance, security and drivers.
Win7 will decide what drivers it wants. In Win8 you don't even interact with drivers, using advancements made in Win7.
Windows update has been silent since that last batch of 32. So I think we're caught up at this point. All the biggies like .NET 4.0, SP1, etc all came through. I have yet to do all the drivers stuff, was still chewing on that along with the advice given here. At this point I'm leaning towards getting all the drivers from Asus which are labeled as certified by Microsoft, and anything else let Windows Update take care of.
Please explain AHCI, all I can recall reading a while back was that it had to do with hot swappable drives? I could be confusing it with something else, but I recall mentally crossing it off as a setting I would use. Apparently I shouldn't have.
would it be correct to assume if the BIOS doesn't see the drive, that windows will not either?
I don't have another machine with Sata controllers, just old relics. So no testing on another machine. But in a bit I will move ports and cables around and see if that helps. I'm still wondering if it might be drivers lacking.
ACHI is more modern technology, like Win7 being driver-complete.
SSD Benchmark Tests: SATA IDE vs AHCI Mode
AHCI vs IDE – Benchmark & Advantage « Expertester
IDE mode and manually installing drivers is XPired and to be used on old hardware when the modern option isn't available.
Registry edit is complete. I will shut down in about 15 minutes, verify that both new drives are either both occupying ports between 1 and 4, or are occupying 5 & 6, as that's how the BIOS splits AHCI and IDE. Can you think of any other BIOS setting I should double check? It's mostly defaults (this is the latest BIOS V2001). I did enable EPU for power management. All the DRAM settings are default and above my head, stuff like interweaving and memory hole fixing. Q fan and cool and quiet are on. All the OnChip sata and Onchip sata ROM are enabled. Let me know if you want me to double check any thing else before I start the AHCI process.
After the change to AHCI is complete, I will go ahead and enable windows to take control of drivers and leave all the Asus software out of it. I kind of feel better leaving Asus out of it anyway, to be honest. All their software made me nervous.
I was going to grab the latest AMD Radeon driver from AMD. It's about a year newer than windows version. What is your opinion on that?