sata hard drive not recognized in Windows 7.

[qmann]

.. and i thought this would be an easy fix.
I have recently upgraded to Windows 7 and have to say was initially pleasantly surprised. Very little problems. All went well. I backed up my data on a 500 gig WD SATA drive and it was recognized.

Yesterday i went to boot up the computer and it was gone. I rebooted windows and it showed on boot-up and in BIOS. I went to computer manager and it was not there, nor was it in the device manager. Windows 7 has done the odd update but i can't believe that this would be the cause of the problem. I had installed some new RAM that didn't work, went back to the old RAM and the drive was still there.. it's just yesterday that it disappeared.

I have some files i would really like to retrieve on that drive, so a format would be a 'very' last resort. Even so it can't be formatted in Windows 7 as the OS doesn't even know its there..

The board is an ASUS M2N Sli Deluxe
Processor is a Quad Core Phenom 9650

Any help would be very appreciated.

 

[kjv1611]

If you feel comfortable getting into the hardware of your PC, which it sounds you do:

1. Turn off computer.
2. Open case
3. Disconnect all cables to hard drive - SATA and Power.
4. Disconnect sata cable from mobo
5. Reconnect sata cable to mobo, then to hard drive.
6. Reconnect power to hard drive
7. Close case
8. Boot up system
9. See if the drive is there now.

If that didn't work, try a different SATA cable.

It's still possible for it to be hardware if BIOS sees it, but Windows does not.

Next step, in my opinion, would be 1 of a couple choices.
First choice - Download UltimateBootCD or another like it... or a live distro of Linux... or whatever - just some app that'll let you explore your files, move stuff around, etc.

Burn that to CD

Boot the machine from the CD, copy your files off to make sure you get them..

Then run various tests to see if you can find any hardware issues on the drive.

That's probably what I'd do, anyhow. I just recently had something similar occur where one of my SATA drives in my main system seemed to disappear. Disconnecting and reconnecting everything for that drive fixed it. Apparently the SATA connection had gotten a little loose - that's my guess, anyway.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[wahnula]

Triple-check all the connections. Swap the SATA connections for the Win7 drive and the 500 GB drive, see if it still boots, if not then swap cables. Check the BIOS mode for SATA, try Legacy Mode or "Use SATA as IDE" and see if that helps.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[qmann]

well figured it out.. it has nothing to do with windows 7, has nothing to do with sata cables.. it's just straight up a bad drive. i tried to hook it up to my external hard drive and it had difficulties reading it there.. wanted to reformat the drive immediately and then the usb connection would disappear and ask to format it again. it's a two year old drive - just didn't last as long as i expected. thanks for your help everyone.