WD Internal Drive not visible after OS reinstall (drive contains data I need)

taifun

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Feb 7, 2010
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Hi to all, I have read the sticky on the top of the board about newly installed drives not being visible in the OS. My problem is that I have just reinstalled my system (Asus P9X79 mobo, Sandisk SSD w OS and 2 Western Digital 1TB drives). Windows explorer sees the OS SSD (obviously) but shows only 1 out of 2 physical WD drives. These WD drives are both 1 TB size. The second drive has loads of data on it that was previously put there and I would hate to lose it, so I need a way to make this drive visible again in Windows explorer without having to wipe it by creating a new partition.

It would be highly doubtful that there is a wire disconnected or anything because I didn't move my pc at any time from the moment I began reinstalling and it was there right before the reinstall. I am running Win7 pro x64.

I have looked in Disk Management and in the bottom pane I see what I believe to be the missing drive, it is shown as: Disk 2 - Dynamic - Foreign, and it has a blank field next to in, instead of the blue line and the "/////" showing the disk allocation. I have checked in the BIOS and there it is shown as SATA3G_3 (Blue). In the top of the SATA configuration window in the BIOS, SATA mode is set to AHCI and SMART status check is enabled.

I figured that the problem would have been solved by installing all drivers that I have on my Asus mobo support dvd, particularly the disk unlocker (but this only applies to larger +2TB drives it seems) and sata management drivers, but this isn't the case. Please help :) If I failed to mention any parameters I'll try to reply asap.
 

chesteracorgi

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I suggest that you download a disk management program like Partition Wizard, and use it to detect the HDD and give you an analysis, DON'T MAKE ANY CHANGES. At least not immediately. You may also want to download a utility like Crystal Disk Info for a physical analysis.

With Partition Wizard you can look at a variety of formats (even some foreign to windows), and while I have never tried to work with a foreign format. it may provide tools for converting the format to one that Windows can read.

Partition Wizard is a great tool for resizing and manipulating disk partitions and provides some tools for both partition recovery and data recovery. I cannot say that it will resolve your problem but it is a starting point.

Both Partition Wizard 7 and Crystal Disk Info are available as freeware from download.com.
 

taifun

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Feb 7, 2010
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Thanks for your kind reply, definitely interesting to try these out. As you say, I am indeed very apprehensive of changing or converting anything at this point, because this disk was visible until 2 days ago. It just went of the map after I reinstalled Win7 (pro x64). My (not so educated) guess would be that this is due to a driver missing or some faulty setting somewhere. It would surprise me that a reinstall of the C-drive causes the E-drive to be converted into a format that is foreign to Windows.
 

taifun

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Feb 7, 2010
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I still haven't found a solution to this problem. I hope someone could tell me what I need to do to get this resolved. I have run Aida64 and there the drive is found, and it says partition type = LDM, whereas for the other (identical) physical WD drive that is visible in Windows, this LDM property isn't indicated in Aida64.
 

taifun

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Feb 7, 2010
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If I did so, I wouldn't know how that happened... If so, shouldn't I be able to see the data from my lost drive on the one that is visible? Because that isn't the case :(