Solved Win 7 can't see the D: drive on system

[loninappleton]

Hello,

This peculiar problem has gone across multiple substiture HD's and also changing
SATA ports multiple times.

During a system slowdown I tried some of the usual things to get the usual speed of
screen rewrites and so on. I reset the CMOS jumper. Did a system restore and just now
apparently completed a clone backup using ghost with no error.

BIOS sees whatever drive I target or choose to boot. But in all this Win7 had 'gone blind'
on seeing the d: drive. I had also tried using the administrative technique to 'activate' the
missing drive's partitions but that may have not been done accurately. Perhaps someone could help in finding what has cropped up.

As it is I have one c: drive all the time and should have a good backup boot drive. Just no recognition of D: in Win 7. I suspected the motherboard or CPU but the BIOS seems to be working.

 

[samuria]

Does the BIOS see the drive does disk management see it?

 

[loninappleton]

Does the BIOS see the drive does disk management see it?

Yes, It's fine in BIOS and I've made a print screen of disk management > storage.

When loaded it said accessing virtual disk services about which I don't know the meaning or if
something needs to be turned off or on.

 

[samuria]

I can't see all the details at the top have you right clicked on partition and assigned a drive letter? You should swap cables as c should be disk zero. It's not clear were you boot from as both drives are set active

 

[loninappleton]

I can make another screen shot at a different resolution with the usual hard to read problem.

The D: attached is simply a clone from Ghost of the C: drive.

Is this not a problem in Windows Admin rather than my backup drive since I've done this for years?

When I come back with another screen shot you want me to swao the SATA line? I've done plenty of that
but will put the current C: drive on the other cable so as to avoid confusion.
You see, I'm pretty sure that booting from what is _ now _ and a swap will give the same problem.
I've done a lot of error checking already.

Will return Shortly.

 

[loninappleton]

here's one more screen shot.

There's not that much to show.

Elsewhere I've made a sata calble swap to a known good port frm the cd rom
drive. It's all the same. Only C: drive shows.

 

[loninappleton]

This is getting frustrating. I'm leaving it for a while.

 

[loninappleton]

One additional thing. Just to see what I should be seeing I made a screen shot from my working system
to observe what D: should look like. It's different in that my problem rig shows that
system reserved partition which you can see on the previous shots.

In Hardware, I've swapped so many things, what I will do is start over.
Selected one good SATA port and attach the D: to each other one to see if I have bad onnections.
My suspicion is no since this problem is recent. And we've observed that the BIOS sees both drives.

What can I use in Windows 7 for the XP System File Checker which uses the install disk
to compare for changes from the orginal? I have simply forgotten if there is a routine for that.

Taking a breather.

 

[samuria]

It seems in disk management you need to right click and assign a drive letter to it. When Windows sees a disk it writes a signature to it so it can track it etc. When you clone you end up with two disks with same signature which can make Windows think it's the same drive, some BIOS also get confused when two disks are set active, a lot are ok but some can have a problem

 

[loninappleton]

It seems in disk management you need to right click and assign a drive letter to it. When Windows sees a disk it writes a signature to it so it can track it etc. When you clone you end up with two disks with same signature which can make Windows think it's the same drive, some BIOS also get confused when two disks are set active, a lot are ok but some can have a problem

What should the drive letter be then? I think I saw that in right clicking options but eventually that may have to be the boot disk if the backup is needed.

Thanks for answering: I'll look at the options. It's something obvious I'm missing.

 

[samuria]

You can set or change drive letter to what ever you want it to be at anytime its seems thats all that is wrong it just need a drive letter

 

[Megahertz07]

You have two partitions on disk 0. As you cloned the disk, fist partition has the boot loader and second should have windows and data.
On disk management, assign letter D: to the second partition on disk 0

 

[loninappleton]

You have two partitions on disk 0. As you cloned the disk, fist partition has the boot loader and second should have windows and data.
On disk management, assign letter D: to the second partition on disk 0

Alright I'll try to follow that.

Is there a setting in Admin Disk Services to automatically assign a drive letter and then save that?
Is there a check box or something?

 

[Megahertz07]

Open disk management (C:\Windows\System32\diskmgmt.msc), Right click on the the second partition of disk 0 - "Change drive letter and paths", assign letter D:

 

[loninappleton]

ok I'll le tyou know how it goes and mark solved at that time.

 

[loninappleton]

Success and marked solved. At least we got through this in the proper steps
rather than a lot more wire jiggling.

I would note in the explanation that when you select change drive letter, a white box shows up and the
new drive letter doesn't go in there. Press the add tab and D: is pre-selected.

Thanks to all who helped. I'll come back of more in needed.

 

[Megahertz07]

Very good.