I've just finished putting together a new Pc for the GF went to go check the HDD's both are showing up as fine in the Bios. However under windows explorer the Sata drive isn't showing up. So I went to device manager and it says that the drive is working properly So I went to Computer Management and the drive is listed as being; Healthy (Primary Partition) Layout - Simple Type - Basic File System is blank but it has no volume label if I right click it all options are greyed out except Delete Volume. Here's the problem normally I would just delete the volume and recreate the partition etc but this drive has information on it that I HAVE TO RECOVER. Does anyone know a way of forcing Windows 7 to assign it a label remembering I can't just change the drive letter as A. it doesn't have one and B. the options greyed out. System is using Windows 7 - Fresh install as of less than 12 hours ago - fully updated Any help at all would be appreciated guys as I'm stuck as what to do next. (Not sure if it helps but I do have access to another Pc if I need it so I can change the drive to a new machine. I just don't want to do it if its not going to help. Second PC is running Windows XP SP3) EDIT 1: if I tell computer management to view the disk list the sata drive is showing up as an IDE drive for some reason. EDIT 2: I went into the bios and changed the drive setting to ACHI and when it booted into windows it started installing sata drivers etc then said the device was ready to use but it still hasn't assigned it a drive letter and all the options except delete volume are still greyed out.
Weird. Having a quick look about seems like this isn't actually that uncommon with Windows 7. After installing the drivers did you reboot? Edit: Is this the primary drive with W7 on?
I have had this problem a number of times and it seems to stem from the fact that the hard drive was formatted using a different file table to your current OS (i.e. from XP to 7). Try putting it in the XP machine, if that doesn't work then you should use some sort of recovery software but if it's just the partition table that is not readable (which is probably the case) then recovery should be quick and straightforward.
no adidan, its a secondary drive the primary's fine and has nothing but the O/S on it the secondary however has about 12 months of files that I may (definitely did) have neglected to back up. by the way the GF says to say thanks again lol shes still cooing over the pretty blue motherboard lol the drive was formatted under XP so switching to Windows 7 may be the cause as MrWillyWonka said so I'll put it in the XP machine later and see if that does it when I get back later.
^ good thinking. All versions of Windows have given me niggly problems in the past, if you can move the files over using it in a caddy or as a secondary drive would be a good idea. Starting from scratch with a format and install tends to be the only way to avoid most annoying problems.
Ah right. Yup, worth giving that ago, windows versions can be picky little buggers. Edit: Tell your GF I'm glad she's pleased. I prefer a black/red PCB myself
One point on possible corrupt drives - do NOT try and write data to the drive (either by doing a quick-format or any other kind of write opetation). There is a possibility that you can recover data if the partition table has gone wonky, but any recovery software will scan sector-by-sector and look for begging/ends of files. Hopefully it'll show up on the XP machine (I do believe there are differences with the NTFS versions used by XP and Vista/7) but they should be backwards compatible.
Ok, I just tried it and plugged the drive into the XP machine and its saying that Drive G: (the drive in question) is not formatted.
You will have to run some recovery software to recover the data if both OS's are not seeing the partition. I use UFS Explorer
One last option would be to run Ubuntu to see if it sees data, however this didn't work when I tried and easiest option now would be to run a recovery.
Actually asking a linux bod would be a good idea, I think there are a few things you can try to see if it can find the files but I've not touched the penquin for years. So to speak.
+1 to this. Linux is very good at understanding the computer hardware - no matter what state it is in. Burn a live CD of Ubuntu, or put it on a memory stick (need to use software to make it bootable), then copy across the files. If Linux cannot pick it up, then it is likely that nothing will.
You could also try Hirens boot disk has data recovery software included just download and burn to a cd or even usb key
