Hard Drive recognized by bios, but not windows

[gott1rott]

Hey all,
I had 3 hard drives connected to my pc with 1 IDE for booting windows and the other and the other 2(SATA and IDE) for storage. I did a reinstall of windows and now my IDE storage drive is not recognized by windows. I looked at the hard drives under computer management but it does not appear at all. It does show up in the bios though. I checked the jumper setting and even tried connecting via usb with an external enclosure. With the enclosure it just found the hardware but no drive on 2 different computers.

Recovering the information on the drive is ideal, but not necessary. That said, does anyone have any idea how to fix this? If I do not find a solution, is there any way to format the hard drive without windows? I thought about installing a different OS on another computer just to format the drive but was not sure if this would work or if there was an easier way.

Thanks in advance.

 

[wii-ste]

If you are using Vista/XP/Server 2003 or Seven, you can look in Disk Management.

Go to computer management (right-click computer then Manage)

On the left of the window, select Disk Management.

This will show not just the drives, but also the partitions on the drives.

It may be that the drive has become corrupt or is formatted in a way that Windows does not understand. Alternatively, it may just need to be assigned a drive letter.