Why does my new storage drive appear 1st in puter mgmt?

I now have an SSD as the boot drive and a 500GB as a storage drive. Why does the SSD show up as DRIVE "1" and not DRIVE "0" in "Computer Management?'

Thought reversing the the SATA cables would solve it but it didn't seem to help, just seems odd to me it's appearing as it is. This order isn't going to help my Acronis backups any <sigh>

Of course in "Computer" the "C" is Win 7 and storage is "F".

Thanks maybe I am too tired to make sense of it tonight....

Regards

Hello Tinsby!

Do you experience any problems with your storage devices because of this?
Sometimes, disk drive numbers may not be the same as the SATA channel numbers. There is no direct relationship between the BIOS order, and the order in which Windows numbers the disks. The disk numbers that are assigned by Windows are dependent solely on the order in which the disks are enumerated and processed by Plug and Play.

This article from the Microsoft support page may help you further:
https://support.microsoft.com/kb/937251

A probable way for you to fix this would be to go to BIOS Boot Order and see if your OS drive is listed first and then your Storage F hard drive. If not, make it so, see what happens.

Cheers! :)

CK_WD

Thanks both of you!

Sorry to say that I have not been able to get the SSD to 'stick' as Drive "0" The only way is to unplug the other drive and let the SSD be the only one. I have restarted the machine with it in that state multiple times to no avail.

When I connect the storage drive the BIOS immediately finds that and adds it to the boot order, when that happens the choice to add the SSD is gone! So now instead of having 2 drives with the letters reversed. I have a machine that only recognizes one of the drives at a time!! Where do I go from here?

I have encountered this problem with other machines I have built and forgot this time, of course, to plug the drives in, in the order I wanted Win 7 to find them. But in those cases simply changing the order they were plugged in solved the problem, never had it with SATA drives however.

Now I don't know how to solve it..

TVeblen, I am like you IE: OCD in how things 'look'! I don't like it one bit and refuse to accept it the way it is. I didn't build it to have the drive letters screwed up <sigh>

What is the registry hack to resolve this problem. Seems a shame to be hacking the reg' on a newly built system but I'll do it. But now I can't get the system to even recognize both drives!!

Regards and thanks!

Hey again Tinsby!
This is quite unpleasant!
You could try and update the BIOS. Connect only your boot drive, update, load the defaults of the new BIOS, shut down, connect your HDD too, see if that fixes the issue.
Also, check your cables if they're working properly and the ports too.

I hope this helps!
CK_WD

TVeblen said:

The part about the SSD disappearing in the boot order in the BIOS is troubling. I'm trying to wrap my head around what would cause that.

It might be helpful to post a screenshot of your Disk Management window, expanded so we can read everything, so we can see if it is anything obvious.

Do you recall formatting either drive as GPT instead of MBR?

Hello again,

I didn't format the drive as GPT that's one thing I am certain of.

Here's the way it all started:

I bought an SSD, I was told to enable AHCI before I put the OS/ Win 7 on to it. So that's what I did. Then I bought a WD 500GB HDD to use as a storage drive for music files and photos etc. With that drive connected and unallocated it wouldn't boot, so I used Partition Wizard to format it to NTFS.

Then I booted the machine and all was fine with the exception of the drive letters in Computer Management being reversed. This is when I started to change the SATA cables around to 'solve' the problem.. lol... right!

Now back to present day, when my SSD is the only drive connected it boots and runs fine. But now, as soon as I connect the HDD, the option for the SSD disappears in the BIOS and the HDD is the only choice.
At one time early on I did have BOTH drives visible in the BIOS. The system now only wants one of the two drives connected at any given time.

Changing the SATA configuration to IDE, allows the BIOS to recognize the HDD storage drive. But I am afraid to try and boot it this way, expecting it to ask me to "insert boot media" or "installation disc" which will recover the system but will take away any gain from AHCI.....

I have attached a screen shot of CM for your consideration.

Thanks to all!

Now after mucking around in the BIOS, I have my HDD visible again to the OS.

Don't ask me why but it is. At one point in the BIOS I changed the setting to RAID, but never booted it that way. Upon changing it back to AHCI, on boot up it said " Loading drivers " then lo and behold my HDD was again visible and accessible.

The original problem remains the naming of the drives is wrong, imho. Drive "0" is the HDD and Drive "1" is the new SSD with 7 and Linux on it.

My concern is that if I make any backups using Acronis the names and numbers will come back to haunt me.

If this drive naming convention is stored in the registry, where is it and how can I modify it to reverse what I have now?

Thanks again!