Windows 7 External Hard Drive won't display

[Daniel Feivor]

I recently bought an SSD and reinstalled windows with my SATA set to AHCI instead of IDE, but ever since then I can't get my External HDD to show up anywhere, not even in disk management. It makes a noise when I plug it in, but that's it. I tried it on another computer running Windows 7 and it worked fine.

I've tried installing new USB drivers and playing around with my BIOS settings, but nothing. I'm stumped and I really need to use this drive on this computer. Can anyone help?

Motherboard: MSI 890FXA-GD70

 

[Jimbo22]

Have you change your AHCI back to SATA mode? Generally speaking when changing from SATA to AHCI mode, it requires a reinstall of the OS because 99% of the time changing it to AHCI will casue a BSOD. Change it back and to SATA mode because the preformance gain is not significant at all when using AHCI mode for most users. Then see of you external HDD shows up and you can access it.

 

[Daniel Feivor]

Well I did initially re-install windows the first time I changed it. It was after the clean install that the Hard Drive stopped showing up. But my performance increase was quite significant actually; it increased the speeds on my SSD by about 25-30%, so its not something I really want to change back. I'm thinking I might just need to try and re-install Windows to get the external drive working, but that's not really something I want to do if it can be avoided.

 

[Daniel Feivor]

Ahh I finally solved the problem and it wasn't even that complicated. I went to device manager, uninstalled the usb mass storage device (the hard drive) and then plugged it back in and PRESTO! It all worked.