I have just upgraded my PC by installing (well, actually my son-in-law did it) a new mobo (Asus P8Z77-VLX) with an

i7 3770k and 4GB of DDR3 RAM.

 

I have 3 x HDDs, 2 @ 250GB and 1 @ 1TB.

 

As I was going from a 4 year old Gigabyte board with an Intel Q9650 we didn't think Windows would boot up and sure enough it didn't.

 

I wanted Windows to install on one of the 250GB drives, intending to put FSX on the other 250GB drive leaving the 1TB drive for all my data and flightsim downloads and other files. Without Windows 7 being available we couldn't see which of the 250 drives had previously had the Win 7 install. So we took a chance and selected HDD 0 and disconnected the other two drives and installed Win 7. After the install had finished I shut down the machine and re-connected the other two drives. Switching back on just gave me the Asus logo followed by a black screen saying "Missing operating system". I disconnected the second 250GB drive and was able to boot into Win 7 again. So that was the drive that had previously held Win 7 and we had chosen the wrong one. 

 

Long story short a telephone call to a friendly local computer shop told me what to do and I had all three drives working but the second 250GB had been given a letter that I wouldn't have chosen. Before I attempted to change the letter, I copied some data on to that drive and all seemed well. Went into disk manager and changed the letter.

 

Since then, although I can see the drive in disk manager, it does not show up in Explorer in spite of several re-starts so at present the drive is unusable. Also, when right clicking on it in disk manager, the options to 'open' or 'explore' are greyed out, unlike the other two drives. Otherwise the entries in manager are all identical.

 

Has anyone experienced this or does anyone know how to get this drive back in use again, please?

 

Iain Smith

Iain

Can you see it in the BIOS? If not Windows won't see it.

Can you see it in device manager?

If yes right click on it Properties - uninstall

Then close the PC and restart and see if windows now finds it.

 

(Apropos of nothing - I have a win 7 clean install and it will only recognise on occasion 2 x SATA connected dvd drives - other times they don't exist and nothing I can do can get them to work including the above -ah well the quirks of windows a reboot will often find them again.)

 

Regards

pH

Do you see it Control Panel/Computer mangaement/Storage/Disk Management? You may have to assign it a letter and name?

Thanks for your responses but I've solved it and it was so simple. In disk manager I right clicked on the drive and selected properties. I then noticed that in the window where the drive title is this one said "Local Drive (F:)" whereas the other two just said "Local Disk". So in that window I deleted the letter, so Disk Manager was now showing it as an unlettered drive. I then went through the procedure to add a drive letter, selected F and exited disk manager.

 

Lo and behold there it was in Explorer without even a re-start!

 

Iain