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One of the Hard disk drive not detected after installing Windows 7

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Last response: October 10, 2012 6:18 AM in Windows 7

salman4u

July 30, 2012 3:37:03 AM

Hello,

I have a 1 TB Western Digital Caviar Black hard disk. While installing Windows 7, a screen for hard disk partition was asked. I created 4 drives: 200 GB, 200 GB, 200 GB and 400 GB. And then the windows 7 got installed. But now when I log into my PC, I can only see first 3 200 GB drives. Where did my 400 GB drive go? What mistake did I do and how can I recover it back?

Thanks in advance!

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Best solution

Solandri

July 30, 2012 5:01:56 AM

Windows sometimes seems to forget to assign drive letters to a drive. Open the Start menu. Right-click on Computer, select properties. When the Computer Management app pops up, select Disk Management. When it finishes loading, it will show you all the drives (and partitions).

If you see your 400 GB partition there, then more than likely it's just missing a drive letter. Right-click it, then pick "Change drive letter" to give it a drive letter. If it's not there, you should see the empty unformatted space. Create a new partition there, format it, and give it a drive letter.

There's another possibility though, which is more complicated but I think more likely. You can only have 4 primary partitions on a HDD. The Win 7 installer likes to create a small 100 MB boot partition, then install Windows onto the first partition you create. So it's likely that your drive is actually configured:

100 MB boot
200 GB Windows
200 GB
200 GB

That's 4 primary partitions, so Windows was unable to create your 400 GB partition. If this is what's going on, you'll see the above 4 partitions in Disk Management, along with empty space at the end of the drive which you're unable to use (can't add another partition).

In this case, you'll have to first delete the last 200 GB partition. That'll leave you with 3 primary partitions. The 4th can then be an extended partition, where you can create a 200GB and 400GB logical drives. Unfortunately, Windows' doesn't come with an easy way to create an extended partition. You can do it from the command prompt using the diskpart tool. But I'd suggest installing the free Partition Wizard instead. I'd actually recommend deleting all the partitions except the 100 MB boot and 200 GB Windows, and putting any additional partitions on logical drives in the extended partition.
http://www.partitionwizard.com/free-partition-manager.h...

Also, why do you want so many partitions? For most purposes, one partition for Windows/programs and one partition for data is sufficient. There are legitimate reasons for having more partitions, but if you're just doing it to try to organize things, I'd suggest just organizing onto a single data partition. Otherwise you're going to run into the situation where one partition becomes full while you still have hundreds of GB free on the other partitions, and you're going to wish you'd sized them differently.