Solved BIOS Cannot Detect Hard Drive After Exiting Diskpart Clean All. Help.

[TiredGuy303]

Hello everyone.

So four years ago, I custom built a new computer which ran really well. However, I wanted to make several upgrades including a new Seagate Barracuda 250 gb hard drive (7200 rpm, SATA II, 8 mb cache) and Windows 7 64-bit on a USB. I know it's not flashy stuff but i'm on a budget and just needed some upgrades to play some pc games.

Today was frustrating. After finally getting Windows 7 64-bit on a USB, everything was going fine until Windows refused to let me install Windows 7 on my new hard drive. The error message: setup was unable to create a new system partition or locate an existing system partition windows 7 kept popping up. I tried many different techniques I saw on YT including changing the system BIOS from IDE to ACHI.

Finally I saw something for Diskpart. I stupidly activated the Clean All option...but the thing took forever and I realized it wasn't the option. So I did an early exit. I can't help but feel like I just made a really stupid mistake because now the BIOS won't detect the Hard Drive anywhere. Did I just remove a perfectly good hard drive from my system? Please help I feel so silly for my impatience...I guess I was so annoyed at everything

 

[ignatzatsonic]

Clean All should do exactly what is implied---wipe everything off the drive. But I've never heard of it rendering a drive unusable. Most likely, you could have used "Clean" rather than "Clean All". Clean acts very quickly.

Can you see the hard drive in Diskpart any more?

You say you had the Windows installer on a USB stick. I assume you built that stick from an ISO file. Where did you get the ISO file?

You enter the BIOS by pressing some key on your keyboard during the boot process. Are you able to enter the BIOS at all?

 

[TiredGuy303]

The ISO file came from a download of Windows 7 that my university has available for free. It is definitely not unregistered and illegal, but I don't think it is directly from Microsoft.

I can still enter the BIOS, but when I went to check for the hard drive, the SATA data wasn't detecting anything even though the HDD is all plugged in and ready to go. Same thing with the Diskpart...nothing at all. It's like the disk just vanished. I turned off the system because i was so frustrated. Chances are the mobo might detect it again who knows

 

[TVeblen]

Clean All is a disk wipe process - it writes all 1s or 0s to every sector on the hard drive, that's why it takes so long.
The Clean command just erases the Master File Table (MBR), but leaves any existing data in the sectors intact.

Try this (assuming the computer is OFF):

• Unplug the problem hard drive, data and power cables.
• Then turn the PC on, go into the BIOS, look around for a moment, turn the PC off.
• Reconnect the hard drive, turn the PC ON
• Go into the BIOS, and look to see if the drive is recognized now.

 

[TiredGuy303]

Yes thank you. I woke up this morning and just decided to reconnect everything again and it now recognizes a hard drive. At least that's all fine...but there are some other issues still remaining, but I will post that in another board