Tried all Steps - New 6TB Hard Drive Doesn't Show Up in Windows

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brandon.baecker

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Sep 20, 2017
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I'm using a Gigabyte GA-Z97X-SLI motherboard. I have 2 Samsung 850 Evo SSDs, one is the primary boot drive. I also have 1 4TB Toshiba X300, and 1 5TB Toshiba X300 serving up files for my media center. I recently removed an old WD 500GB I had some random stuff on and replaced it with a Toshiba 6TB X300 for future storage. I can see it in the BIOS, but cannot see it in device manager or disk manager. I know the cable and port are working, because I had a previous drive in there before working fine, but I even replaced the SATA cable. I did not move to another port yet because I don't have any free sata ports and I have to remove my graphics card to get to them. Any ideas?
 
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Stupid. So literally all I did when I got home was go into BIOS classic mode, where it showed the hard drive, disabled and re-enabled the SATA port for that drive and it worked fine. I was able to see it in Disk Manager and it told me to initialize it. I did and then was able to format it and assign it a drive letter. One of those stupid things that shouldn't work, but it does, when all the logical things fail.
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brandon.baecker

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Sep 20, 2017
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Yeah, I was doing this on lunch break from work, so I didn't have time, but I'll have to try when I get home. I'll definitely try it, but I'd be surprised if that was the issue since all the ports have been in use and working.
 
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brandon.baecker

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Sep 20, 2017
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I'll try when I get back home. It's a brand new drive so it shouldn't have any formatting. Normally I'd do that through disk management, but it's not showing up, and it won't show up when I scan for new hardware in device manager. It's possible it was DOA from Amazon, but I want to do more troubleshooting first.
 
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bigpinkdragon286

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Oct 3, 2012
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You know the cable and port were working however, you moved things, and often times it's when something is disturbed or moved that it malfunctions or fails.

Easiest test for the cable and drive is, does it show in the BIOS, and it would seem you've already confirmed that it does. This to me would diminish the case for DOA.

Why isn't the drive showing in Windows? No idea.

Drivers for the hard drive controller?

RAID drivers?

RAID management software?

Hardware RAID settings for the motherboard that are misconfigured?

Are your SATA ports configured as AHCI in BIOS?

Do you have Fast Boot enabled in BIOS? Perhaps it's failing to perform a full initialization of the drives?

Easier than removing your GPU to get at the ports on the motherboard, it might be simpler to unplug all other drives except for your boot drive, then use one of those other cables if it reaches, for the drive you aren't seeing in Windows. That would put it on another port, and limit the drives you are looking for in Device Manager or Drive Management to 2.
 
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brandon.baecker

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Sep 20, 2017
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Thanks. I'm very careful when unplugging and plugging things in and am pretty sure I didn't damage anything. I'll try disabling Fast Boot, then unplugging one of the other drives if that doesn't work. AHCI is definitely configured because my other drives wouldn't work on IDE. This was setup before installing Windows. However, after doing more research some BIOSes give the option to run some as IDE and others as AHCI so I'll have to check that, but I don't remember seeing that option in my Gigabyte BIOS when I was in there earlier.
 
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bigpinkdragon286

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Oct 3, 2012
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Gigabyte sometimes has SATA ports that are run from an add-on chip, not the chipset, so may have slightly different support for large drives there, but at this point in time, I would highly suspect none of your ports should really have issues with high capacity drives.

Only other thing that comes to mind would be, are any of your SATA ports sharing PCI-e lanes with M.2 card slot or SATA Express ports, and are any of these in use? At the same time, I would think if this were the case, it would have affected your previous drive on the same port in the same fashion.

I'm not concerned about your being careful when plugging and unplugging your SATA connections. At least with first generation SATA connectors, the connector itself was at fault. After a year or so of use, the connectors would fatigue and cause intermittent disconnects from the SATA port.

Perhaps a better test for the drive if you can't get it showing in Windows would be to attach it to another computer. It may be that while your drive's firmware is POSTing, SMART is either disabled on your machine or failing to catch further problems with the drive.
 
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brandon.baecker

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Sep 20, 2017
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Yeah, the M.2 slot disables 2 SATA connectors, but I'm not using an M.2 drive on this machine. I built it before M.2 drives were really a thing and my board only supports M.2 at 10GB/s which isn't enough of a performance difference to replace my current expensive 6GBS/s SSDs. :) But yeah, the old drive wouldn't have worked. I'll test it in another rig as a last resort, but I don't have one lying around and would have to go to a friend's place.
 
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brandon.baecker

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Sep 20, 2017
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Stupid. So literally all I did when I got home was go into BIOS classic mode, where it showed the hard drive, disabled and re-enabled the SATA port for that drive and it worked fine. I was able to see it in Disk Manager and it told me to initialize it. I did and then was able to format it and assign it a drive letter. One of those stupid things that shouldn't work, but it does, when all the logical things fail.
 
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