Can't intialize Internal Hard Drive

[Radeon962]

I can't figure this one out. I wanted to add an extra WD 640GB Black HDD to my system for backing things up, but windows Disk Management will not let me initialize the disk. If I right click on the left pane of the drive in Disk Management I get a Virtual Disk error telling me that "The system cannot find the file specified".

I can see the drive in BIOS, but that's where it is weird, since NONE of my other drives (one SSD and two HDD's) are shown in the BIOS. I assume that it is because I have AHCI active. The new WD Black shows up, but none of the others. All drives show up in Disk Management with the other drives all Healthy.

The new drive is fine as it came from my other machine and was a data drive there, so no OS was on it.

I have to believe it has something to do with AHCI, but have not been able to find anything yet to let me initialize this HDD and make it available to Windows 7.

Any ideas?

 

[Zillatech]

You should be able to see ALL of your drives in the BIOS. Do you have the latest BIOS for your Motherboard? Have you tried another SATA Port or another SATA Cable? I had problems with one of my SATA Ports and even though it would detect drives in the BIOS, they would fail under Windows.

 

[Nothinman]

Yea, I would be more worried about the drives missing from the BIOS. Unless they show up in one of the onboard or add-in card's chipset's firmware.

 

[Radeon962]

The SATA port is fine as I have another HDD that I am using in place of the WD right now. I wanted to use the WD since it was a larger drive for backup. BIOS is the latest version available from Gigabyte.

My understanding was that when AHCI was active, the BIOS more or less thinks that the SATA drives are SCSI devices since they can be hot swapped with AHCI active.

The WD was not in the computer when I activated AHCI, so I am guessing that is what is the issue as the one I am using now was originally in the computer and in place when I activated AHCI.

You can't see any of the drives on either of my two computers in the BIOS (other than when I add the WD Black) as both have SSD's as the OS disks so I have AHCI active on both machines. All of the drives are detected and listed during the boot process (after the Gigabyte flash screen).

Do either of you have AHCI active or are you running in SATA mode (as all of my HDD's were visible in BIOS before switching to AHCI).

 

[Puffnstuff]

I run ahci on all of my controllers and all drives are shown by bios at startup.

 

[Nothinman]

The SATA port is fine as I have another HDD that I am using in place of the WD right now. I wanted to use the WD since it was a larger drive for backup. BIOS is the latest version available from Gigabyte.

My understanding was that when AHCI was active, the BIOS more or less thinks that the SATA drives are SCSI devices since they can be hot swapped with AHCI active.

The WD was not in the computer when I activated AHCI, so I am guessing that is what is the issue as the one I am using now was originally in the computer and in place when I activated AHCI.

You can't see any of the drives on either of my two computers in the BIOS (other than when I add the WD Black) as both have SSD's as the OS disks so I have AHCI active on both machines. All of the drives are detected and listed during the boot process (after the Gigabyte flash screen).

Do either of you have AHCI active or are you running in SATA mode (as all of my HDD's were visible in BIOS before switching to AHCI).

In order to boot from a drive, the BIOS has to see it in some fashion regardless of the protocol being used and the SCSI interface or protocol doesn't enter into it at all. The fact that your BIOS boots from a drive that it won't show you is extremely weird.

 

[Radeon962]

Maybe I did not state it correctly....

All of the drives show up during the boot sequence, i.e. when the screen is all black and the computer is booting up.

Where I don't see them is if I hit [Delete] at the Gigabyte splash screen to actually enter the BIOS and then go into "Standard CMOS Features" where the SSD's and HDD's would normally show up if IDE/SATA. I do see the WD 640 listed here in the BIOS, but none of the others and that's why I thought it might have something to do with AHCI.

It is set to Auto in this section, so that the BIOS does indeed detect the drives during POST, but I don't believe that it is picking up the new WD 640.

I'll have to reboot again and see if I can pick it out during the boot. I have another WD 640 Black in the system already, so I'll have to see if 2 show up along with the others.