SATA hard drive not showing in My Computer

[justlnluck]

Hey guys, I hoping I can get some help here. I just purchased a 1TB Saturn Hitachi drive to replace my 500GB Hitachi. Both are SATA. I unplugged the old 500GB one and installed the new 1TB drive. I formatted and installed Vista on the 1TB. Then I decided to copy some files from the 500GB drive that still had everything, including an OS on it. Well, I plugged the 500GB into another SATA port, but it did not show up in My Computer. I then tried accessing the drive in another computer that already had another SATA hard drive with Vista. It did not show up in My Computer there either. I thought maybe there was something wrong with the drive and started freaking out because I didn't want to lose my files. So I unplugged the 1TB drive, plugged the 500GB back in and it loaded Vista fine. So what is going on here? I just want to access the drive for some files. How come I can use it as a single drive, but not access it when I'm using a different hard drive?

 

[zerocool84]

Click start button/windows logo. Right click on computer. Click manage. Then go to Storage and then disk management. Does it see it there???

 

[Adul]

need to enable it in disk management as zerocool pointed out

 

[RebateMonger]

Does the drive show up in the BIOS? Many BIOSes have each individual SATA port turned OFF by default and it won't see a drive unless the port is enabled.

 

[GADGETNOWMAN]

I have just had the same problem. Had a 500Gb HD which I removed and fitted a new 1Tb HD, this was to be my new main system drive. The older 500Gb drive, this was to be a backup drive. When fitted, Vista did not see it (maybe the BIOS would i dont know). I think this should do the trick, it did for me.

Start / right click on Computer / select Manage / System Tools / Device Manager / in the main window right click Computer / Scan for hardware changes

This will make the drive visible in Computer



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