Internal hard drive not recognized

Amric · 21 Nov 2010

My system consists of 2 500 GB drives in RAID 1 and a 3rd 1 TB drive for storage and backup. All are SATA drives. System is about 6 months old. The 1 TB drive is about 1.5 years old and was used in my prior system, but had been reformatted and was working just fine in my new system up until now.

I recently reinstalled my OS on the raid array and reformatted (full format) the 1 TB drive in an external enclosure connected to a second computer (Win XP). I then installed the drive directly in my case and booted up. The array is fine, but the 1 TB drive is not recognized by the OS.

The Intel Raid manager detects the 1 TB drive as an "off-line member" upon start-up prior to Windows loading, but once loaded, Windows does not detect the drive, even in disk management. I tried changing the cables, and the drive bay, but it did not make a difference.

If I remove the drive and put it back in the external enclosure, the computer will still recognize it as an external drive. Ran HD Tune and all drives check out okay.

Thanks for your thoughts.

whs · 21 Nov 2010

I suspect the problem is that the 1TB drive was formatted in XP. Read this rather lengthy discours about the possible problem. I would reformat it with Partition Wizard bootable CD.
http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-...n-manager.html

kword88 · 21 Nov 2010

why not try reformatting it from within win7?

whs · 21 Nov 2010

kword88 said:

why not try reformatting it from within win7?

How do you do that if it is not being recognized?

kword88 · 21 Nov 2010

if it shows up at boot time, couldnt it be reformatted using the win7 DVD?

whs · 21 Nov 2010

Doubt it.

Amric · 21 Nov 2010

I should have added that while connected to the new system via the external enclosure, I did a quick format just in case there was something different about a Win 7 format vs XP. I could do a full Win 7 format if it would make a difference.

I also went into the BIOS and did not see the 1 TB drive listed under devices, but it is still seen by the Intel Raid Manager upon start-up, so I'm still at a bit of a loss here. I'll check tomorrow whether or not accessing the Intel Raid utility from Windows allows me to see the drive, but I'm guessing it won't, since the rest of the system doesn't seem to be able to.

PS: I read the article about hybrid MBR's. I'm not doing a dual boot configuration, adding partitions, or anything else complex. I'm just trying to keep things simple - having an extra drive on hand for storage and backups.

Amric · 22 Nov 2010

Did a full Win 7 format and no luck.

Downloaded and used active@ killdisk hard drive eraser, and then the disk is now good to go.

The Intel Matrix Storage Raid Manager now shows the drive as a "non-raid disk" at start-up, rather than an "off-line member", which was probably the cause of the problem!