Win 7 doesn't see my other sata drives

[MrNatural]

My Vista system drive crashed so I decided to install Windows 7. I disconnected my data drives, removed the crashed drive and I installed a new sata drive and the install went without a problem.

When I went to hook up my old sata drives one at a time (to identify them) I would start windows 7 and it just gets to the start screen and hangs.
If I unplug the drive and reboot, it works fine. It doesn't matter which of the 3 extra drives I hook up, if I hook any of them up, win 7 won't start.

I can see all the drives in setup just fine.

Any ideas before I uninstall win 7 and reinstall Vista?

Thanks

 

[Barman58]

Can I assume that the previous OS was on one of the other drives?

It may be the issue is due to the fact that the drives were not present when win7 was installed and one is still marked as the active drive. This can lead to the Vista system attempting to start and failing due to the major hardware change

Check if you can see the drives in the bios, and make sure that the win7 drive is the active drive.

You could then try a start-up repair of the win7 system from the install media

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/681-startup-repair.html

or alternatively use an offline partitioning tool to organise the drives. The one I use is here ....

Partition Wizard is a Windows based FREE Partition Manager. It works as partition magic and supports Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 server and Windows 7. FREE for Home and Business user.

and provides a bootable disk version that is fully win7 compatible

 

[MrNatural]

Hi, thanks for the ideas. Neither of the three data drives that I'm trying to get Windows 7 to recognize were boot devices. In bios, my new replacement HD with Win7 on it is the only active one.

I tried a few more times, hooking them up one at a time and once when I left the startup screen to sit for over 5 minutes it brought up a screen saying that it found a drive but it had to test it. I let it run and it found loads of bad sectors. This was in addition to the old C: drive that wouldn't boot up. So two of my four physical drives had errors at the same time.

I hooked up the other two drives that didn't work before and now they work fine. The (2nd) non-working drive was not hooked up when I was trying to get the OS to recognize either of them so I have no idea why they magically started working.

I'm going to put the one win 7 said was full of errors on another pc to see what it has to say. I eventually managed to get my old system drive to work on that pc long enough to get my latest docs off it. I ran a surface scan to try to fix it and the next morning the drive appeared to have been reformatted. I hope I don't have a HD controller problem.

 

[Barman58]

It may seem strange but sometimes just changing the sata port used with a particular drive will be the difference between it working or not - no logical reason for it

 

[Carlos40]

Was any resolve found because I having the exact same problem?!

I just put a new 500gig sata drive in with Win 7, tried to add my older drives but 7 just hangs at start up, The drives are seen in the bios?

Tried changing the ports but the same problem!?
The last time I tried it said NTLDR is missing?

Note the drive I m trying to add I reformatted.

 

[computersplus]

first thing I would do here guys is clear your CMOS then check your data cables sounds like the OP had some funky cables

 

[Carlos40]

Problem was solved by going into BIOS and checking boot order!
For some reason when I installed the other drive it was bumped up to first boot order?
I corrected that & now everything is fine!