Can't see HDD and did the guide

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milkboy

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Nov 10, 2012
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I am trying to setup Windows Server 2012. The problem is that I have three SATA drives connected and only two are being seen by Windows. I have gone through the steps in the guide http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/265764-32-guide-installed-disk-system but I still can't get it to work. I installed the NForce 4 drivers for my Biostar MCP6P motherboard and that should have fixed it.

All three drives are shown in the BIOS. All three drives are shown in the device manager. Only two are shown in disk management.

This machine used to be setup as a FreeNAS server and so the drives were all formated for FreeBSD. But in the windows installation setup I removed all the existing partitions.

I have spent all day on this. Help?

Scott
 
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milkboy

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Nov 10, 2012
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There are three SATA drives and only two are shown in disk management. I can format or partition the ones that show in drive management. The problem is that the third one doesn't show up in drive management and therefore can't be used.
 
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milkboy

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The BIOS settings have RAID turned off. The SATA settings are very simple in my Phoenix BIOS. They are basically "Enabled" and RAID is "Disabled".
 
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weaselman

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I have the same board in my spare PC, it is running in Raid 0 with two drives at the moment.
It also worked fine before I did this with three drives running in Sata mode.
Are all the drives Sata II drives ? Because if its a Sata III The drive will show in the Bios and not windows.
It can be that the drive its self does not support backwards compatability to Sata II.
But I suspect its more a case of the drive not having an active primary partition.
 
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milkboy

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Nov 10, 2012
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The three drives show up in Device Manager under Disk Drives as
ST320082 2AS SCSI Disk Device
WDC WD10 03FBYX-01Y7B SCSI Disk Device
WDC WD10 03FBYX-01Y7B SCSI Disk Device

The missing one in Disk Management is the third one and it is the exact same drive type as the second one.

I tried using diskpart to create an active partition on the missing drive but it is missing in DiskPart as well. I could not select the disk so I couldn't do anything to it. is there another tool I could try?
 
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weaselman

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As a test, if you remove one of the WDC drives,the one you can see and works. leave the one in you say you cannot see, and see if you can format it.And setup a partition on it.
Then plug the other drive back in.
 
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weaselman

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I am suspecting that the two drives of the same size may not be playing well with the mix of the other drive,but also trying to find out if the conflict is not with the two WDC drives.
If it fails I would do a double check that the Sata port is enabled in the Bios. Im sure you could turn ones off.
The bios will see the drive and its size but just not show in windows.
 
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milkboy

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I am trying that right now. I am using Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic. My missing drive is drive #3 and it does not pass the "read" test. So I'm doing a full erase on that drive now. Estimated time is 2 hours. The quick erase failed.

The Data Lifeguard reports that all the drives pass the SMART test so I conclude the drive isn't bad. And FreeNAS never reported anything wrong with it.

 
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weaselman

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I will get back to you, just off to check the setting in the system I have since it is using the same board, Just wondering why it would fail on a quick format though.
Do you know what file system the drive was using, I mean had it prior to anything been formatted in another file system Fat 32,NTFS. Or is it a fresh from factory?
 
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milkboy

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This has been a wild ride. Western Digital Lifeguard was unable to write zeros to the "bad" drive and failed after the one hour mark into it. Then Lifeguard reported SMART errors for the bad drive. OK, the drive must have failed but FreeNAS never had a problem with the drive. What are the odds that it failed right when I was installing Windows Server? Too suspicious.

So I took out each 1 TB drive out of the server and formatted them in my main Windows 7 computer. Windows 7 had no trouble with either drive and was able to format them just fine in Disk Management. Windows 7 did warn me that the "bad" drive had been formatted for a non-windows file system and that I could try to copy that data off before it wiped it out.

When I put the drives back into my server machine now the problem is gone and all three drives are seen in Disk Management.

I'm currently trying to setup Storage Spaces and I'm about four hours into that process. Most of that time is just watching the progress bar, not trying different things.

So my theory that FreeNAS left the drives in a state that was incompatible with Windows Server is a good one except that both my 1TB drives were in FreeNAS and only one of them had a problem in Windows Server.
 
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