Hi guys,

I decided to upgrade my PC to 64-bt Win 7 and simultaneously replace my aging hard drive.

I had C: (windows install) and E:(WD Caviar SE16 500GB, full of flight sims, data, etc.)

I removed C: and disconnected power and SATA cable from E:

Put in a new C: and installed Win 7 64. Everything installed OK and once it was running, I shut down and plugged in E:. On reboot, Win 7 doesn't see it. I checked Disk management and there is no unassigned drive. I went to Western Digital and looked for any driver I might need. There is none. I checked with Microsoft and it says that drive should be recognized by Win 7 64 with no extra software. Supposedly no jumpers are necessary. I changed power cables, SATA cables and moved to a different SATA port. Nothing makes a difference-it's as if nothing is plugged in.

The only thing I did to that drive was disconnect it while Win7 was installing and reconnect it after the installation. Is there anything you can think of to try and get Windows to see it?

Thanks

Does your BIOS see it as a valid SATA drive with the right description etc? I would eliminate that issue first I think.

Edit: If it is seen, but Disk Management doesn't even show it as 'raw', then it's possible the new windows install is using a AHCI for the new drive, but that mode isn't supported by the older disk. You could try disabling AHCI (to use plain ATA) in your BIOS to force windows to see both drives.

What Fearless said.

Ok, I'm a bit of a BIOS novice, so I'll just post what I see:

3 of my 4 SATA slots have something plugged in. 2 Hard drives and a DVD ROM. A secondary DVD ROM is not SATA.

Primary IDE Master HL-DT-ST DVD-ROM (Is that right? Shouldn't this be the boot disk?) I think this is the secondary DVD ROM
Primary IDE Slave None
SATA 3 ST1000DM003-9YN1 (I believe this is the new Win 7 drive)
SATA 4 HL-DT-ST DVD RAM

The Older drive I'm trying to get recognized is WD5000AAKS-00YGA0 and does not appear.

What's the make of motherboard, as we might be able to help with BIOS fiddling options?

If it's not being picked up by the bios at this stage then I'd check connections. Do you feel the drive spin up, i.e. the power connection is ok (please don't electrocute yourself tho!) If after doing that, I'd be tempted to do the following:

- Unplug the new drive and the SATA DVD drive
- Plug the old one back in
- Go back into bios (i.e. don't Windows boot) and check that it appears

The Primary/Secondary IDE thing is different from the selection of which device is checked for a boot partition, so don't worry about that IDE side.

It's an outside chance, but your power supply might not be enjoying booting up the wee surge of four mechanical drives. To narrow that down, it's worth wolf-fencing the issue down to see if that's the case (by trying one at a time, or in pairs).

Hope that helps.

Asus P5ND motherboard.

Cables are the same as when it was working this afternoon, but I did try swapping the power cables and SATA cables. Nothing looks loose. Will check the rest shortly.

Thanks guys.

Power supply is 750W and has been ok up to now. Further tests tomorrow.

Ok, it appears that this motherboard only likes hard drives in SATA ports 3 & 4. This is probably a severe case of RTFM. Thanks all!

or a failed raid array setting left over in the bios, so SATA 1 and 2 are refusing drives unless they match.

I have the same problem, sort of.
I had Win7 32 bit loaded. Windows was doing some funkie stuff, so I decided to nuke it and start over. I decide to give the 64bit another try, and it took. So now I have Win7 64bit as my op system, yea me! So now I don't need to upgrade my computer yet to do that. But after I got it loaded, up dated it, I looked to see if it saw all my hard drives and such. As it did, it did not see the one drive that all my games are loaded on. I keep Windows on one drive and my games on another. So now I have to figure what happened. It was fine Sunday night. But I'll check my bios to see it sees everything first off. After that, and I expect it does, given my luck, not sure what to do after that.