Win7 won't show my secondary drives any more

jimigunne

June 30, 2012 1:10:31 PM

I have an ASUS M3N /quad core desktop PC, It has two HDDs, both SATA. The boot drive is a 1TB Seagate and the other drive is a WD 1TB drive, internal. I also have a WD 500gig Mybook USB. Windows 7 Ultimate completely crashed, I could not boot even into safe mode. Only CMOS was still accessible. I Had a backup image stored on the internal WD drive. So I restored Windows 7 Ultimate using the Win 7 installation disk. This reformatted and restored the boot drive (unfortunately it was an image made MONTHS ago----lost a lot of stuff!). The only problem now is that neither the WD 1TB SATA drive nor the 500 gb Mybook external drive are being mounted and utilized by Windows. They are just not there in Explorer. However, they both show up in CMOS, and in Windows, they are listed in device manager, and also show up in disk management. And it says they are working properly. I have been able to verify that the Mybook drive is still fine, by plugging into a laptop PC. Have not been able to verify that the WD internal drive is still OK, files are still there or not....but surely the files are all still there since it worked fine for restoration form an image. When I run ADD DEVICE, Windows finds nothing. I ran File Checker, it did not find any problem with system files. Something must be wrong with plug and play....but I have tried plugging in my sons' external USB laptop drive into it, and it works perfectly with Windows. Plug and Play is finding these drives, but will not mount them! Any ideas what could be the fix?

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rolli59

June 30, 2012 1:54:09 PM

Have you assigned them drive letters in disk management?

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jimigunne

June 30, 2012 6:17:30 PM

OK....I figured out from Disk management that there is a drive signature conflict! The C: boot drive (Seagate) is listed as Disk0, and half a gig of it is shown as 'Unallocated" (screwed up!) Really the supposed unallocated partition partition is accessible in explorer as "B partition". Then the WD 1TB internal secondary SATA drive shows as Disk 1, (G: B partition), also divided in two with half gig shown as "unallocated". My Win7 image restoration should not have done anything at all with this drive, it was installed recently, and the image is from months before I even had this drive. The Mybook external is listed as Disk 2, shows 500 gig as it should, no drive letter assigned. When I click on the exclamation mark it says that this drive is offline because there is a signature collision with another drive already on-line. I think all this trouble is because I recovered windows from an old image, from several months ago, and my drive configuration has changed since then. I have Partition Magic 8....could I use this to fix this problem? I definitely do not want to risk losing the data on either of the secondary drives, it would be a disaster!
I don't have another computer to plug these two drives in so that I can back up the data first!

I guess each drive has a ID signature or number stored on it, and they are both the same, causing a conflict? Then is there a safe way to change that ID, and which do I need to change? The WD 1TB SATA, or the 500GB Mybook?