Windows 7 Windows 7 does not detect second hard drive in new Asus G73JW laptop

jwistead

Well-Known Member
Hi, I just bought a new Asus G73JW laptop. I also picked up two new SSD's (Kingston SNVP325-128G), removed the two 500Gb OEM drives from the G73JW and tried to do a clean install on these new drives. I'm having some problems recognizing the second drive and I hope there is help for me.

On the first drive, I've installed Windows 7 Pro 64 bit, followed by Kubuntu 10.10. Everything works great in Kubuntu... I can see and use both drives without any problems (the first drive has an NTFS partition for Win7 and an EXT4 partition for Kubuntu). The second drive is just NTFS.

When I run Windows, the second drive is not detected anywhere. In particular, I open the Computer Management -> Disk Management tool, and it only shows the first hard drive (and it's partitions). There is no trace of the second drive, and rescanning for it doesn't find it.

So I thought, I should reboot, go into the BIOS, see if there's a problem. I tried this. The BIOS does not show the second drive either, even though Kubuntu has no problems at all reading and writing to the second drive. As best as I can tell, this has to do with the BIOS/motherboard treating the second drive as a slave drive.

So then I tried this: I removed the drive from the internal slot, connected it to an external drive bay (via USB). The drive shows up just fine, and both Windows and Kubuntu can read and write to the drive just fine. I reformatted the drive to NTFS from Windows, just to ensure that this wasn't the problem. Then I disconnected it from the external USB hookup, and put it back into the internal hard drive bay. Reboot into Windows. Nothing. Reboot into Kubuntu: it works just fine.

What gives? Does anyone have any experience with something like this? Very frustrating to think the only way I could get this second hard drive to work is by external USB.

Thanks in advance for any comments.
 
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