HDDs not showing on computer

Hi,

Recently I reinstalled win7, I think I may of made an error when formatting.

Because now my HDDs are not recognised in ' computer '

But show in 'device manager' & BIOS

I have tried to alter settings in ' disk management ' ie- reformat, assign new letter.

In 'device manager' when I open disk drives and select the properties tab it says, ' the device is working properly '

If you have used a format command then it is possible that all the data is gone.

assuming you are running as an administrator account, right click on the old disk, (or the root folder if visible). Select properties then the security tab, change the owner of the drive to your user name or the administrators group. make sure you check the box to cascade rights to sub-folders and files, for completeness I would then give your user name full access rights to all the drive (folders and files checked again) you may get some errors on any system folders on the drive, ok these and when complete, may take a while dependent of drive size, see if the files are now showing

I've been dealing with this sort of error since the start of NTFS file system security. it's due to the fact that although we see two users on different installs as the same user, (we'll call the user ken ). the two systems involved both see the users as a string of letters and numbers SID or security identity, unfortunately for us mere mortals the system, [for the valid reason that as this started as a network security system you can imagine that a 10000 user system would likely have more than one Ken ], the system will generate a random number (at least some of the ID is random).

When you move a drive between systems the system will see the permissions that were granted to Ken as the SID as different to the SID allocated to Ken by the second system, and as the SID is not known by the second system will not even show the contents of the drive.

It may be possible to activate the hidden Super Administrator (which I think always has a certain SID) and see if you can access the drives - if you can you can then use this account to set permissions on all the drives/folders/files.

another thing to use to check the status of the files is Bootable Partition Manager| MiniTool Partition Wizard Bootable Edition which will allow you to explore the drives (via a Linux shell so often does not have access issues with NTFS drives ). assuming the PW disk can see the drives and If you have a little bit of unused space on any of the drives, it may be worthwhile creating a small partition, to check that the drive is usable

Thanks for that Barman58,

Don't get me wrong, I am not looking to access any data, I backup before erasing and reinstalling.

I would just like to have access to the drives, I can boot no worries.

To cut a long story short, I was thinking about installing win10 to the OCZ SOLID3 SSD, further down the line,
If I can get access to that drive.

Is that possible?

If you are not concerned with the data, fire up the partition wizard disk [or if it's easier actually grab a copy of the free version and install on your system], and this should show you the physical drives and allow you to delete the partition(s), and recreate and format the disks ready for use (pw sees more that windows own disk management), when you are ready to install 10 either update or check out the full options list for fresh installs at our sister site Windows 10 Forums

To be honest Barman58,

I made a massive error reinstalling after getting BSod, I wanted to install the OS back on my OCZ SOLID3 SSD, (not very technical)

So I messed up and now it is on another, is it reversible or would it be hassle

How do I access the partition wizard?

Download either the free package and install as a normal program on windows MiniTool Free Partition Manager for Window 8/7/vista/xp | Partition Wizard Free Edition

or download the ISO file and burn to disk or USB stick

Bootable Partition Manager| MiniTool Partition Wizard Bootable Edition

Boot partition manager from USB Flash disk directly to manage disk partition - Partition Wizard Bootable Flash Drive.

If you have issues getting the ISO onto the USB I always use Rufus

https://rufus.akeo.ie/

After that it's a case of insert USB or DVD into system and reboot, (may be best to use the BIOS drive selector (often F12, but systems vary) to select booting from the media)