Windows 7 - Hard drive present in device manager, but unaccessible and missing in disk management

[flashbacck]

Last night I did a clean install of Win7RC on a new HTPC system. After the install, I found I was unable to access my two hard drives I used for media storage (maxtor 160gb, and WD 750gb). They were completely absent from My Computer, but present and without error in the device manager. I went to Disk Management, and was able to click the WD 750GB and "import foreign disk," but I am unable to do the same for the maxtor. The maxtor doesn't even show up in Disk Management.

The maxtor shows up fine in the bios and the device manager, and I am able to see the drive with other tools like Seagate's Seatools (no errors from disk). Anyone know how I can get Win7 to see this drive?

Another thing is, I had JUST used the maxtor on my old HTPC system running win7RC and it was working fine.

 

[flashbacck]

fixed it! Had to do with partition table not being read by windows for some reason. I used a program, testdisk, to find the partition table and restore it.

 

[NetGuySC]

The same happens to me every time I load 7. I have 4 drives on my system and a different drive or more than one drive will not appear in "my computer" after a fresh install of 7.

Once I right click my computer and then go to manage ..disk management.. the missing drive are there and I am able to get them to be available again, but I do forget exactly how.

 

[Swampster]

Go into GPEDIT.MSC / User Configuration / All Settings, and look a listing with the title "Hide Specified Drives in My Computer". Make sure this is set to "Not Configured".

I have found this problem on several installations of Win 7 Pro RTM on upgrade installs from Vista, but never on a fresh install. BUT . . . I still don't know what is causing this random change from the default setting, so I guess it is possible to have it in a fresh install also.