Hard drives missing from Disk Managment

My hard drives all seem to be working fine, and they show up in My Computer and Device Manager, but not in Disk Management. The DVD/CD drives I have installed do, but none of the hard drives (I have 3 internal and 1 external connected).

The only thing I think that could possibly have caused this is my attempt to disable an old boot drive. After doing so in device manager, I tried restarting and everything seemed to fall apart. I finally had to start with "Last known configuration that worked", which brings me to where I am now. Any help would be much appreciated!

Not to call you a liar, but I'm not sure how this is possible. Usually it's the opposite predicament (not showing up in my computer, but present in disk managment).

Are you sure you are looking in the right place in disk management? Could you have the HDD category minimized somehow?

Have you used any cloning on your disks? Windows does not allow two disks the exact same UUID (unique identifier label). So if you cloned a drive/partition you should only connect one of them at a time; two filesystems with the same UUID might cause windows to behave differently.

Just download GAG (graphical bootloader) and install it, then you can boot from your new HDD. Keep your old HDD disconnected during this. This should work without having you to re-install windows or loose any data.

GAG can be downloaded from:
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gag/gag4_10.zip

Extract and burn the cdrom.iso file to an empty CD-R. Then boot from it, choose install and add your windows operating system. Any modification you make to the menu will have to be saved by going in the menu and press H (Save in Harddisk). Really its an easy GUI just follow the instructions.

I installed GAG how you described (had old drive disconnected, saved it by hitting H, etc), but when I try to boot from the new OS, I get "NTLDR missing". Any ideas?

I have just started to get the same problem as masurm73

I am running 3 hard drives. 2 SATA and one PATA. Up untill today, they were all visible in Disk Management.

All that is visible in Disk Management is my USB stick.

I am running VISTA Ultimate 32bit, with Service Pack 2.

The drives show in device Manager, but when I bring up Properties, Volume tab and click Populate, i get a message saying "Volume Information for this drive cannot be found" This message is displayed for all hard drives and for my DVD RW

I have never ever erver had to install any SATA drivers at all for this system, even with windows XP i never had to install SATA drivers. I have reinstalled all chipset drivers and have had no luck whatsoever

The only possible cause i can think of is that the Virtual Disk service is corrupted somehow

(While looking in Advanced System Settings, Startup and Recovery. i noticed that the Default operating system drop down box is blank)

Any help with this will be most apprieciated.

does anyone have any ideas? I just want to make sure I don't block myself out from the hard drive by doing this.

The /fixmbr will overwrite GAG and replace it with Windows' own boot loader. But that may not be the problem, its likely the boot files on the system partition itself, use /fixboot for that. Microsoft says:

Could you please explain to me in layman's terms what FIXBOOT will do?

Will it reassign my new drive (K) as the C drive? If so, what will happen to my C drive when I reconnect it? Will I still need to run FIXMBR after running FIXBOOT? And do I still need to run the GAG utility after all this? thanks

Your problem probably is a rootkit virus. I just suffered through the same problem and searched everywhere for a solution. My symptoms were that device manager and explorer displayed the drives, but disk management was a complete blank for all drives (including cd roms). Chkdsk and defrag couldn't recognize any drives and system restore was not functional. Couldn't burn cds or dvds because no program could find a device to use; although, I could read cds and dvds, and the dvd drive displayed in the device manager, but I couldn't write to the device.

I tried several rootkit detectors, and the only one that found and eradicated the hidden files and registry entries was McAfee Rootkit Detective Version 1.1, which is a free beta release. It found the hidden files and registry entries in the first pass (about 10 minutes) and allowed me to rename the hidden files and remove the hidden registry entries (which by name were obviously associated with the hidden files -- all of which were named "higrui*.*" where the "*" was variable).

That resolved the problem, restored the visibility of my drives and partitions in disk management, restored functionality to checkdsk and defrag, and restored full access to my dvd drive. Go to the McAfee site and download the free and fully functional "Rootkit Detective" (you might have to search for it on the site, but it's there).