Windows 7 does not recognize my HD

[Neo727]

During a Windows 7 installation upgrade from XP, 7 does not see my HD. Upon checking my properties it says my C: HD is a DVD drive. Also my D: Recovery is showing as a DVD drive. My Acutal DVD drive shows up as a DVDRAM drive. I am sure this is my problem however upon entering into Disk management it shows no drives.

Any suggestions? It is a 2.5 Hitachi 80gb drive in an Asus A8J laptop. No additional drivers on the Asus site.

Doug

 

[sminlal]

The first thing I'd do is to disconnect everything except the drive you're installing onto. That will eliminate any misidentification of drives, and it will also prevent the Windows 7 install process from creating the small 100MB boot/recovery partition on a different drive from the OS drive itself (which it does if it can although most people prefer it to be on the OS drive).

 

[Neo727]

Easier said than done. D: is a recovery partition. Maybe I could "eject"it? There are no other drives other than the DVD drive I am installing from. I am just now reading there is no direct upgrade from XP anyway so I am destined to do a clean install it seems.

Thanks for the input.

Doug

 

[sminlal]

What is D: a recovery partition for? Is this a laptop that came with recovery tools built into a special partition?

When I install Windows 7 I normally disconnect everything except for the OS disk, delete all the existing partitions on it, then create one big partition to cover the whole disk. I do this because I use a separate disk to hold data files. When you do this, the install kit automatically creates the 100MB recovery partition and uses the rest for the OS.

 

[Jonathern]

Have you tried assigning new drive letters to the devices through disk management? Basically click second mouse button within disk management on the specific drive and change drive letter, this should solve your problem