Windows 7 Windows 7 Not finding Hard Drive - This is one different from all others. It appears.

TheSpiderX

New Member
Hi there,

So I've been searching through the threads and probably missed what amounts to an easy answer.

I just reinstalled Windows 7 after upgrading my mobo, ram and cpu. As it stands my internal Maxtor 300gb hard drive, is showing up in the Bios. In fact it shows up in the Device Manager in windows. But when I go to the Computer Management to try and assign a drive letter to it, it's not there.

I just put it into an external ide enclosure and windows picked it up no problem. It installed the drivers and everything. BUT I still can't see the drive. It's not in Windows Explorer or the Computer Management.

But does anyone know why I can't get windows to see it? Even though Bios and the Device Manager see it.

Thanks
 
You must have done an upgrade and this partition with no drive letter is where Windows boots from.
 
I did do an upgrade. But this drive was never associated with a windows install. Is there any to manually assign it a drive letter if I can't see it in computer management?
 
What does it say about the drivers in the device manager?

Try this.... update the drivers and tell it to look in c:\

it will go though your entire system and try to find drivers... since it shows up in device manager Win 7 knows it's there but the drivers aren't loading... they may not load if there is a conflict with something else... or sharing an IRQ setting.

Also look in your event view under administrator logs. It may tell you exactly what you need to do.
 
It says that the drivers are fine. No conflicts or errors that I can see.

I just tried updating the drivers, and windows told me that the drivers are up to date.
 
Here's what error message I got when I looked at the Event Viewer. I'm not sure what it means:

The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR3, has a bad block.

It happened 6 times
 
It says that the drivers are fine. No conflicts or errors that I can see.

I just tried updating the drivers, and windows told me that the drivers are up to date.


First, if you haven't already done this... click "Start" and type and enter "Tro" and bring up the trouble shooting program and let it test your hardware.

If no problems are detected and finxed I would uninstall the hard drive's drivers from the device manager.. then click on Action and scan for new hardware...
.... you'll have to reboot to find out if it's fixed.
 
Here's the thing, the drive in question isn't showing up. So I can't just use the Computer Management like that troublesolving says to.
 
Try going to Start > Run, and type diskmgmt.msc.

Select the window and choose Alt + Prt Scrn and post this an an attachment for us to look over your partitioning scheme.
 
There are none actually. In fact, the hard drive that windows can't see in the Disk Management, shows up in the device manager.

It's the Maxtor one
 
This is what I would try. No guarantees! Pure speculation on my part, so make sure you have essential data backed up.
Boot up again with your Windows 7 installation dvd. Go through the initial windows as usual and select custom install. Assuming you can then see the HD, select it as your choice for installation and select the option to format it.
Now back out and reboot and see if it identifies the HD. I am not certain, butthe only problem this might create is a change around of partition letter assignations. You can solve this problem by, once again, using the DVD and selecting the repair start up option.
 
Thats a really good idea, except I don't have that data backed up. Since I can't actually get windows to recognize the drive, I can't get the data backed up to another drive.
 
Thats a really good idea, except I don't have that data backed up. Since I can't actually get windows to recognize the drive, I can't get the data backed up to another drive.


Sure you can.. just boot from the Windows install cd with another drive in your system .. go to c: and do a dir to see if it's your bad drive... (Dir) if not .. check d:

When you know which drive has you data, go to the other drive and run Xcopy with the drive letter to your data...

example

xcopy c:\*.* /s /e /f

it should copy just about everything.. it will definitely get your working files and photos and other stuff.

Apparently your hard drive has errors on it.

You should try HDD Regenerator.. it can often fix bad sectors without losing any data.
 
Here's what error message I got when I looked at the Event Viewer. I'm not sure what it means:

The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR3, has a bad block.

It happened 6 times


It may be a problem with the "write delay" that windows set/enabled on your drive.

Click "Start" and type "Dev" and select Device manager... select "disk drives" then right click your drive and under policies you can make changes that may fix your problem.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/159865/
 
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