Solved 4TB WD4003FZEX: Windows 7 Fails to find/load driver

[nwadave]

:banghead: This is my 2nd attempt to install a brand new WD4003FZEX in my Windows 7 x64 machine. I assumed the first one was bad, so I exchanged it for another. I am NOT new to PCs, in fact I am ashamed to say I'm a tech with 15+ years experience and this one has me stumped. I have installed countless drives, and this one should be dead easy!

Windows simply says it failed to find the driver. The BIOS does see and correctly identify the drive. The motherboard is a modern Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H with UEFI, so no problem there.

I would be very grateful to anyone that can help me solve this.

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64
CPU: Intel Core i7-2700K
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z77-D3H
Memory: 32GBCorsair Vengeance (4x8GB) CMZ32GX3M4X1600C10
Graphics Card: EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550Ti
Hard Drives:
Boot: 256GB SSD: Samsung Electronics 840 Pro Series MZ-7PD256BW
Secondary Drives: WD 2TB & WD 640GB

 

[dbtmellis]

Download the drivers from the manufacturers website?

 

[Layback Bear]

I'm no expert on such matters but I did find a tutorial that might help you. It refreshed 1 of my 3 brain cells.

Give it a read and see if it brings something to mind.

By Brink:

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/26193-convert-mbr-disk-gpt-disk.html

 

[Anshad Edavana]

Hi

Do you remember providing SATA driver manually ( via pendrive ) when you installed OS to the SSD ?.

If you plug the 4 TB HDD as a slave drive and boot from the SSD, can you format and partition the disk using Windows "Disk Management" ?.

 

[nwadave]

Let me clarify a couple of things:
-The SATA drivers are already installed, and they are the current drivers. All my current drives are working fine.
-I am NOT trying to install the 4TB as a boot drive, just want to install it as additional storage (slave).
-Windows Disk Management can't see the drive because the drivers aren't loaded.

 

[nwadave]

SOLVED! Using the logic that the drivers should be native to Windows 7, I decided to force install them. Here's how I did it:

1. Find the drive in Windows Device Manager, double-click it to bring up the properties window.

2. Click the "Driver" tab, click the "Update Driver" button.

3. Click "Browse my computer for driver software", browse to or key in "C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository" (without quotes) Make sure "Include Subfolders" is checked.

4. Click "Next" button, after Windows finds the driver, you should see "Windows has successfully updated your driver software". Click "Close".

5. Once I did the above, the drive was showing up in the Disk Management console, HOWEVER I was unable to format it...kept getting weird errors even after rebooting. Looking in the device manager, I noticed 2 more devices with the yellow exclamation mark indicating no driver was loaded. I went through steps 1-4 for the other 2 devices, and BAM! No more errors in Disk Management. My drive is now working fine!

I have no idea why Windows was unable to find the drivers in it's own driver store that had the whole time, but whatever. I've learned over the years that sometimes Windows just needs a little extra help to work the way it should.

Thanks everyone!