How do I get Win 7 to recognize SATA internal hard drives?

[Erik The Pope]

Hello,

Due to my XP not booting up, I installed Win 7 to a new WD hard drive. Installation fine. Then I hooked up to SATA hard drives that I had been using for storage while on XP. I assumed that 7 would recognize them but nnnooooo. BIOS finds them, 7 finds them on dev mgr but when I clicked on "computer" they are not there. Then I went to disk management, it saw them but when I right-clicked on the partition every thing except "delete volume' was grayed out. I have read a lot of stuff but it all boils down to right-clicking on partition & choosing "assign new drive letter". I can't do that. What else can I do?

Help me, Obiwan, you're my only hope...

 

[Erik The Pope]

Also, uninstalled & scanned for hw changes, still the same, no joy...

 

[rolli59]

Try resetting your BIOS and boot up again with all drives installed.

 

[inzone]

If all else fails you can use this free software to recover your files even if the volume is formatted or deleted and repartitioned , the files will still be there even though you can't see them. That's where this free software can help out.

http://download.cnet.com/Recuva/3000-2242_4-10753287.html

 

[jrazor247]

Do you know what format the drives were? RAIDed by anychance? Were they dynamic disks? What version of windows (home premium/ultimate) are you using? Windows home premium doesn't support certain formats the ultimate and pro do.

 

[Erik The Pope]

BIOS sees all the drives. I am using Win 7 Pro. The drives were formatted with XP. In disk manager they are listed as "simple, basic, healthy (active, primary partition) (both of the unrecognized HDs) I don't think I am using ACHI. They were never RAIDed.

 

[Erik The Pope]

Malmental, one is a Seagate & the other is a Maxtor. Homebrew quadcore, 2GB memory. This computer is about 3 years old & worked flawlessly with XP. Someone told me to try booting with Partition Wizard, that it would let me choose drive letters. Anything to that idea? Or just loading P W?

 

[Erik The Pope]

Malmental, I don't know but I doubt it. I will check later...

 

[Erik The Pope]

They both have jumpers. I will have to see if I still have the instructions for them. (Probably I do, being very anal!)

 

[rolli59]

Any change the drives are formatted FAT32? http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/37560-windows-7-unable-read-external-drive-formatted-fat32.html

 

[Erik The Pope]

They are formatted NTFS...

 

[Soda-88]

try using MiniTool Partition Wizard home edition (the freeware one)

http://www.partitionwizard.com/download.html

see if you can change letter with it, windows partition manager is an awful piece of software

 

[Erik The Pope]

I was not referring to Windoze partition manager. This is an aftermarket program:

http://partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.html

 

[Erik The Pope]

Oops, I didn't read that very carefully! ;-)

 

[Erik The Pope]

Partition Wizard says the partitions are formatted as "other"...

 

[Soda-88]

hmm, seems like you'll have to recreate volumes and reformat

what brand are the drives that are causing issues?

 

[Erik The Pope]

I just found that Partition Wizard says they are Norton Go-Back partitions.

Soda 88-no way, Jose, there is a lot of Grand Jury info on those drives. As I said above, one is a Seagate and one is a Maxtor.

It seems that the Go-back partitions are a problem. Maybe rewrite the MBR?

 

[turk_1000]

Before doing anything too crazy check them on another computer. If it is the same you will probably have to recover the data off of them using a recovery program. If they work fine on another PC then you know the problem is just your PC and work from there.

 

[Feldii]

In case you haven't tried this already, try hooking up just one of the SATA drives at a time and try each SATA port on your motherboard.

 

[Erik The Pope]

I did get this solved. I downloaded a program from Norton which was designed to remove the GoBack stuff from the partition. I tried it (carefully) and it worked. Got all my data back. Thanks for trying...

 

[Erik The Pope]

The files were always there. The GoBack partition was not readable by Windows. The Norton guy said it was sort of like Raid (even tho it wasn't Raided) with the "other drive" the gobackio.dat file on the same drive. It removed GoBack data from the partition & restored the normal partition readable by Windows.

 

[Erik The Pope]

You betcha, Red Ryder!