Hard drive not showing up in Windows

This is from The_Prophecy Found in the Windows 7 tips....
I hope this answers your question.


Windows 7 hides empty drives (both fixed, and removable drives) by default, but many people don't realize this. If you could swear you had a freshly formatted drive just hooked up to the computer, but can't seem to find it, click on Organize, Folder and Search options, select the View tab, and uncheck the Hide empty drives in the Computer folder box.

If the drive is not yet formatted, make sure you run through the steps above (so you aren't further confused in a minute), and then type diskmgmt.msc into the Start Menu search bar. Here you should see all drives connected to your computer. Format as necessary and then they will appear in the Computer folder.
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I just put a new 500 GB drive in my system and it shows up under "Disk Management" from there you just format and it's done!!!!
Are you running win7 or xp/vista?

Sorry, should have said it is a hard drive which I have been using in an external case (actually, it came in a My Book).
But it disappeared one day and so to try and get the data out, i took it from the case and plugged it in directly, so it is formatted and full and was working for a couple of years.. but then suddenly disappeared and now is no longer accessible.
While most recovery tools need to see the drive, Windows seems to now know it is there. However, it is in BIOS, so perhaps there is something else which can find it, or a way to force Windows to find it.
But as I said above, it is not in Device Manager either.
Thanks for your replies!

As it "disappeared one day", I would guess that there is some fault with it. This would explain why Windows can't see it.

One possibility would be to boot from a Linux live CD to see if that can see the drive.

The thing is that would BIOS see it if it is broken? I did try to boot into an Ubuntu CD, on my laptop, but am unable to try on a desktop at the moment.. I am not really familiar with linux so wasn't sure where to look to be honest, but it wasn't automatically found when connected by USB.

If it wasn't damaged (either the hard drive itself or the partition) then it should show automatically on most Linux setups. Do you know anyone else with a Windows computer that you could try it on? How about another hard drive that you can try in the enclosure?

I'm afraid there are situations where a drive will show in the BIOS but is so badly damaged that it is unusable in an OS.

I see. I was hoping that the fact BIOS can see it might mean it isn't completely dead. But it is looking that way.. Strange because it was just sitting there, working perfectly..

I don't have another drive at the moment to try, but perhaps will try that when I get the chance.

Well thanks a lot for all the feedback!

Mark

THANK YOU !!
For weeks I have been wresling with this andwith your advise it took about a 1/2 hour to solve the problem A+ Sugestion