I recently had to reformat my primary hard drive because i foolishly deleted some necessary windows files. With because of that, Im now back up to speed on the primary hard drive. However, for some odd reason, my 500gb hard drive will not be recognized by windows. It is recognized in the bios, but not windows. Any ideas?
Issue with hard drive
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Is this drive by any chance SATA and are you running XP?
XP does not natively support a lot of SATA drives and you might just need to install drivers for it. A good way to check is to right-click on 'My Computer' select 'Properties' then navigate to the 'Hardware' tab and select 'Device Manager'. Any category with an improperly configured or malfunctioning device in it should be expanded with an exclamation point on the device.
XP does not natively support a lot of SATA drives and you might just need to install drivers for it. A good way to check is to right-click on 'My Computer' select 'Properties' then navigate to the 'Hardware' tab and select 'Device Manager'. Any category with an improperly configured or malfunctioning device in it should be expanded with an exclamation point on the device.
Well, thats just it. It recognizes the sata drives & treats them like you treat your cat (i hope youre kind to your cat btw). However, the 500gb drive is the only ide drive i have. I never had this issue before the primary drive went haywire.
Well its obvious that if it would show under the device manager, its gonna show up under the my computer area. Something i just noticed is that 1 of the ide cables that i have in my machine is in its only lil slot & is connected to 1 of my optical drives. What im thinking of doin is moving the 500gb hd on top of that optical drive, that way the motherboard will read it. Why the motherboard wont read the cable on that one slot, i dont understand. Btw, got a quick question. I was looking on my motherboard & it said pri & sec raid. Raid only works on ide cables right? Reason i ask is cause the shape of the controller on the motherboard fits the ide cable shape.
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Actually, that isn't true at all. The device manager displays ALL DETECTED devices including those not installed properly or malfunctioning. So a drive that is not working properly, can in fact show up on the device manager and not in the 'My Computer' panel. I really need to know if any devices show up with error flags on them before we can proceed.
As for switching which IDE channel (which is what I assume you are talking about) the drive is plugged into, this shouldn't make a difference unless the jumper settings are wrong on the hard drive. But if you'd played with the jumpers since it last worked, you'd have mentioned it.
And RAID can be done with SATA as well. If you actually have IDE channels marked as RAID on your motherboard, then that means you have hardware RAID built into your motherboard. This means you can configure and run a RAID setup without having any software overhead cost. I briefly ran my system on a pair of 35GB SATA drives in RAID, but the hardware RAID in my motherboard was pretty glitchy and the overhead on the software RAID pretty much negated any gain I had.
As for switching which IDE channel (which is what I assume you are talking about) the drive is plugged into, this shouldn't make a difference unless the jumper settings are wrong on the hard drive. But if you'd played with the jumpers since it last worked, you'd have mentioned it.
And RAID can be done with SATA as well. If you actually have IDE channels marked as RAID on your motherboard, then that means you have hardware RAID built into your motherboard. This means you can configure and run a RAID setup without having any software overhead cost. I briefly ran my system on a pair of 35GB SATA drives in RAID, but the hardware RAID in my motherboard was pretty glitchy and the overhead on the software RAID pretty much negated any gain I had.
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You do have the correct drivers for your IDE controller chipset, right?
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It seems unlikely that an IDE cable would just up and fail on you, but it's always possible. Really, there are a half dozen reasons why a drive doesn't display in explorer. But since you blatantly refuse to take even the first step of diagnosing the problem, I am washing my hands of this thread. Don't ask for help if you can't have the common decency to listen to the person that tries to help you.
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Lafinass is right, before you waste any more time or money, you need to find out if the drive even shows up in Device Manager. If it doesn't, then try your new cable. He's also right in that one of the last things that would go wrong is the ribbon cable. If the new cable doesn't work, you're hosed.
If the drive does show up in Device Manager, it's likely that windows hasn't assigned it a drive letter and you'll need to do that in Disk Management. This could be because of many different things, but there are 2 most common scenarios. 1: Windows hasn't assigned a drive letter, or it's been assigned a conflicting drive letter. Or 2: The drive isn't reporting that it's formatted.
Right-click the My Computer icon, go to manage. In the tree view on the left side, click on Disk Management. Over towards the bottom right, you'll need to look for any disk that doesn't show up in the list in the upper right. If you do find one that shows in the lower but not upper, right-click it and select Change Drive Letter and assign it to a letter that's not being used.
If the lists are the same.... you're likely hosed.
If you find a disk that is showing as unformatted with ~500GB capacity, you might want to see about finding someone locally to help see if they can recover the data before you reformat.
If the drive does show up in Device Manager, it's likely that windows hasn't assigned it a drive letter and you'll need to do that in Disk Management. This could be because of many different things, but there are 2 most common scenarios. 1: Windows hasn't assigned a drive letter, or it's been assigned a conflicting drive letter. Or 2: The drive isn't reporting that it's formatted.
Right-click the My Computer icon, go to manage. In the tree view on the left side, click on Disk Management. Over towards the bottom right, you'll need to look for any disk that doesn't show up in the list in the upper right. If you do find one that shows in the lower but not upper, right-click it and select Change Drive Letter and assign it to a letter that's not being used.
If the lists are the same.... you're likely hosed.
If you find a disk that is showing as unformatted with ~500GB capacity, you might want to see about finding someone locally to help see if they can recover the data before you reformat.
I would have to agree, the chances of an IDE cable just dying are very slim. It is most likely something to do with the fact that you had to re-install windows.
There are numerous questions that need to be answered. First start with what people have been stating so far. What is the state of the drive in device manger?
i.e. Is it installed, is it running correctly according to windows, is it in the other category.
Also check in the control panel, then administrative tools, computer management, disk management and what does the drive report here? What partitions are on it? WHat are they formatted as?
I would check to see if this drive was potentially setup using an IDE raid configuration in the bios, because if that was the case then you might be missing the raid driver for WinXP; however XP is generally pretty good at picking this up and installing the necessary driver by itself.
Give us an update and we will proceed from there.
There are numerous questions that need to be answered. First start with what people have been stating so far. What is the state of the drive in device manger?
i.e. Is it installed, is it running correctly according to windows, is it in the other category.
Also check in the control panel, then administrative tools, computer management, disk management and what does the drive report here? What partitions are on it? WHat are they formatted as?
I would check to see if this drive was potentially setup using an IDE raid configuration in the bios, because if that was the case then you might be missing the raid driver for WinXP; however XP is generally pretty good at picking this up and installing the necessary driver by itself.
Give us an update and we will proceed from there.
No Bioghost, i already checked all that. I checked under the device manager & it only shows the 2 drives. Someone from another forum suggested the bad cable idea so im gonna switch the drive to the other ide cable that i have & see what happens. If it shows up on it, then its simply a bad cable & I save myself from buyin another hard drive.
Ok, heres an update. Looks like it was the bad cable that was the issue cause i temporarily switched the hd to the other ide cable & it works! so im gonna go by this chop shop near me & get another cable. Anyways, thanx for all your help guys!!
I have great news! I know that this is like a lil over a month old thread, but just a small update. Apparently I was smart enough to save all my fav wallpaper on another hard drive, so they never did get deleted in the 1st place!! Im so happy bout that 
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