Several days ago, I had a regular customer requiring a check on his computer as it was running exceedingly sluggish. As it was an old single processor, he decided to upgrade the M/B/Ram/cpu & O/S. I persueaded him to purchase a new base unit instead. This was done & it was requested that I add the Data drive from his old unit - this is a 250gb sata drive that I installed 8 months ago. This problem has been bugging me for the past 2 days. Thre new base unit was one of my last Vista Business (32bit) in stock. The bios sees the HD but Vista does not, so removed drive & added to my main workstation (Win 7 32bit) & that bios sees the HD, but the O/S does not. Bios on all machines up to date. Also, changed the sata cables connecting that drive & also the power connections. Still no joy. This is what's bugging me - I removed the Data drive & attached to my laptop (Win 7 Home 64bit) via an IDE/Sata adapter. As soon as I attached the USB connection to laptop, it instantly recognised the drive. On clicking on drive, I can see all the 143gb of data. Why can't Vista/Win 7 see this drive? (tried with internal connections & also external USB, no joy).

Give a try to this procedure: Control Panel -> System and Security -> Administrative Tools ->Computer Management -> Disk Management -> Right-Click on the Harddrive not displayed in the computer map -> Add driver letter. Regards Milos

Tried that on both Vista & Win 7. Only got as far as disk management. Hardrive not displayed nowhere to be found in either O/S. As I can get access to the drive from the laptop, I installed the drive in an external enclosure & connected to his old XP computer & drive seen with access to the data. Customer does want an external drive for backup purposes, so think that this will serve as the solution. However, could this be part & parcel of the known sata issue with Windows?

"Sirius B" wrote in message news:77dbde5b-2a87-4fd8-809d-febbfe1e2c72... Tried that on both Vista & Win 7. Only got as far as disk management. Hardrive not displayed nowhere to be found in either O/S. As I can get access to the drive from the laptop, I installed the drive in an external enclosure & connected to his old XP computer & drive seen with access to the data. Customer does want an external drive for backup purposes, so think that this will serve as the solution. However, could this be part & parcel of the known sata issue with Windows? What 'known sata issue'? Noel Paton | Nil Carborundum Illegitemi | CrashFixPC | The Three-toed Sloth

Does diskpart see it as an available drive? go to cmd prompt with elevated privelages type diskpart hit enter then when diskpart loads type LIST DISK does it see the drive within the listed disks? if it does type select disk (number of the disk) then type assign I had this issue a while back and it was happening because win7 would not automatically assign the drive a letter. althought i could not see the drive in disk management diskpart did pick it up.

"Sirius B" wrote in message news:77dbde5b-2a87-4fd8-809d-febbfe1e2c72... Tried that on both Vista & Win 7. Only got as far as disk management. Hardrive not displayed nowhere to be found in either O/S. As I can get access to the drive from the laptop, I installed the drive in an external enclosure & connected to his old XP computer & drive seen with access to the data. Customer does want an external drive for backup purposes, so think that this will serve as the solution. However, could this be part & parcel of the known sata issue with Windows? What 'known sata issue'? http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itprohardware/thread/35eee15b-69c0-4927-856a-3f0622893074 Noel Paton | Nil Carborundum Illegitemi | CrashFixPC | The Three-toed Sloth

Thanks Dunn2010, I'll give that a try.

Unfortunately, Diskpart failed to pick the drive up, yet it is still being seen by the bios.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itprohardware/thread/35eee15b-69c0-4927-856a-3f0622893074 AH - thanks.Noel Paton | Nil Carborundum Illegitemi | CrashFixPC | The Three-toed Sloth

Hi, I am just writing to check the status of this thread. Was the information provided in previous reply helpful to you? Do you have any further questions or concerns? Please feel free to let us know. Regards, Alex Zhao TechNet Subscriber Support If you are TechNet Subscription user and have any feedback on our support quality, please send your feedback here.Alex Zhao TechNet Community Support

No Alex, the issue is still there, however, thanks to Dunn2010 for his tip, that has come in very useful over the past couple of days. I received several calls over the weekend & on attending found similar on both laptops. With both laptops, after the bios boots up & enters windows (both are Win 7 Home) they freeze in that the loading circle keeps spinning but nothing happens. Reboot into safe mode, same issue. So next stop was to boot into repair mode from instalation disk. This started good but hung up, both laptops did exactly the same. Removed drives, & attached to adapter on my workstation. Both drives scuccessfully installed, but "My Computer" did not pick them up. On going through Disk Management, found that both drives had lost their drive letters, so used diskpart to re-assign. Re=attached drives to laptop, one has already completed & re-installing on the 2nd atm. Still have the issue in the original post. Could this be caused by a virus?

Hi, Due to this issue only occur to certain computers, I dont think this is caused by the virus, for a test, I suggest you update the BIOS firmware to see what the result is. Alex Zhao TechNet Subscriber Support If you are TechNet Subscription user and have any feedback on our support quality, please send your feedback here.Alex Zhao TechNet Community Support

Hi Alex, sorry that dosen't cut the mustard I'm afraid. Laptops are Toshiba & Dell with bios up to date. The desktop is a HP & to cap it all off, I've just had one of my new 1.5tb drives have the same thing happen to it. My win 7 32bit does not see the drive even though the bios does. To further test on whether or not all the drives are problematic, I shut down my server - I have a 5in3 backplane installed as well as 6 dual drive external enclosures attached via usb. 1st off, I removed the drives from one of the enclosures & added the 1.5tb & customer's 250gb drives. On booting up the server, it recognised both drives added to computer (but not added to storage pool - running WHSv1) Shutdown again, removed drives & added to backplane - rebooted & drives seen with same results. With the customer's 250gb, I backed up his data onto my laptop & reinstalled drive into his computer. Booted up using a win98 startup disk, deleted the "non-dos" partition & rebooted after reconnecting his C drive. Using disk monagement, I formatted the hard drive & it's now being seen, copying over data atm. I agree with you that it's not a virus, but beginning to wonder if there's a problem within Windows 7,either an underlying problem or could it be the results from the last round of Microsoft's updates - it wouldn't be the 1st time this has happened.

Hi, Sometimes, it could also be caused by the corrupted device driver. Have you tried the method in above link? http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/w7itprohardware/thread/35eee15b-69c0-4927-856a-3f0622893074 Alex Zhao TechNet Subscriber Support If you are TechNet Subscription user and have any feedback on our support quality, please send your feedback here.Alex Zhao TechNet Community Support

Hi Alex, yes, no joy I'm afraid. I have found a workaround, but it leads to one of two conclusions - either the O/S is problematic or the drives somehow got corrupted (personally, I don't think it was this). I've recently installed a D-Link Sharecenter 320 on my network (it uses EXT3), NAS seen it instantly, initialised & formatted it. Before I commenced using it, pulled drive & reinstalled on my workstation. It seen the drive, so formatted & partitioned it then rebooted numerous times - each time drive showed up & with drive letter.

Hi, If the hard disk driver is not very compatible with Windows Vista/Windows 7, then such issue will occur. So I advise you use fltmc command to check which drivers have you installed, such as you can run fltmc filters to list to filters registered in the system. Regards, Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Hi Peterson, wow, are you suggesting that modern sata drives are not compatible with Vista/Win 7? Whenever I build systems with more than one hard drive/Ram sticks, I tend to use the same components, i.e., same ram & same drive manufacturer & capacity. As most of my customer base are home users, with the majority being families with children studying, many have purchased laptops. To make this issue more problematic, I have had several more this weekend with the exact same issue, so your suggestion does not bode well for Microsoft, or in fact, the manufacturers of those laptops. Had the issue been all on the same manufacturers systems, then it would be more than possible that there is a serious issue there. However, it has now cropped up on Acer, Toshiba, Dell, & HP, as well as on one of my systems (self built). As I only use the same drive manufacturer on my systems, why is it that all the other 1.5tb drives do not have this issue as if the drive is not compatible with Vista/Win 7, they should also be failing.

Hi, It seems that I didn't explain the issue clearly. Generally, of course, the SATA drivers are compatible with Windows 7/Windows Vista, but if the drivers or connected cables have some problems, it could cause such issue. I understand that you have upgraded all the BIOS/SATA drivers, changed the SATA cables, but it still occured. I think one possible cause is that the disk driver is blocked by something else, so have you found something via fltmc command? In addition, wish this KB is useful for you: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/937251 Regards, Please remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Hi Peterson. I've ran the command as you suggested. However, from what I've seen, how one is to gain useful information from that, unless one is an operating system guru, is beyond me. It tells me that I have 7 instances running & running fltMC Instances shows all drives present. From the workaround used, I can only assume that the drives were somehow corrupted, as adding them to the sharecenter using ext3 wiped everything clean. On reinstalling them & formatting to NTFS, all drives now seen by the operating system.