2nd Internal HDD Not Showing Up in Windows

YZFRydn · Jun 18, 2009

Let me preface by saying sorry if this is a stupid question and/or I do not provide enough information.

I have a Dell Precision 390 desktop that was running XP Pro until I switched it over to Windows 7 to test it out. I have two WD 160GB SATA drives inside of it. When I start the computer and go into the setup to look at what drives are enabled, it recognizes the two different drives. Once I boot into windows it does not recognize the second drive. I have tried switching the second drive to different ports to no avail. I used a new OS Install disc to see if it would show the drive in case it needed to be formatted and it still did not show the second drive. I can hear the drive spinning just fine. I have a Sabrent Cable Converter that I can plug into the USB Port to see if it shows up that way using Active Recovery Partition software if anyone thinks that might help.

Any ideas or thoughts would be much appreciative. The people at Dell told me to send the whole thing in. Let me know if you need anymore information.

Thanks!

spehling · Jun 18, 2009

do you have the jumper settings correct? I would hope that this is not your only computer as windows 7 is a beta version. this could be your problem. does the secondary drive show up in bios?

YZFRydn · Jun 19, 2009

No it is not my only computer. I was also running XP Pro before and ran into the same problem. The secondary drive does show up in Bios. The jumper settings are the exact same on both drives.

spehling · Jun 19, 2009

you should have one of them as a slave.

mailpup · Jun 19, 2009

Master and slave do not apply to SATA drives.

spehling · Jun 19, 2009

oops!!!!!!!!!!

spehling · Jun 19, 2009

did a little research...
hope this helps,

The problem may be you're not looking in just the right spot . Click Start, RIGHT-click My Computer in the window, then click on Manage from the menu. In the new Computer Management window expand "Storage" if necessary and click on Disk Management. I expect OP (damaster) and joses both have got this far. Now, examine the TWO right-hand panes. The upper one shows you only the devices Windows already knows how to use. The lower one, which SCROLLS, also shows you other devices Windows does not yet understand. Your new disk should be here with no letter name and no info. RIGHT-click on it and, from the menu, choose to Partition the drive. You'll have a choice of how big it should be and most likely want to use all the drive in one volume. (You can use only part of the space. If you do, when you are finished come back here and find the remainder shown as "Unallocated Space". You can create a second Partition or more in it if you want.) For this first Partition, make it the Primary or Active Partition, and NOT bootable because this drive is for data only - you already have a boot drive. When all the choices are made, go ahead with the Partition operation.

When that is done, come back to this new Partition and RIGHT-click again and choose to Format it. Choose the NTFS File System option. A Quick Format will do the job in 5 to 15 minutes. A Full Format will do a Quick Format, then go though every sector of the drive and test it, marking off any faulty ones (very rare) so they won't be used. Full Format takes many hours!

When you are done, reboot and your newly prepared hard drive should show up in My Computer as an empty unit ready for use.

YZFRydn · Jun 20, 2009

Already tried that but thanks! Disk Management only shows the C Drive, my External,and my CD-Rom drive.

Any other ideas?

YZFRydn · Jun 20, 2009

This is interesting. I turned off the computer, and plugged the 2nd SATA drive into the ports for the 1st one, and booted the computer up, somehow the second drive is designed to mirror the first one in case the first one goes down.

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2nd Internal HDD Not Showing Up in Windows

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