Hard drive no longer showing in windows

AshleyC

AshleyC

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Ok My current setup which worked fine...

1 x SSD for windows OS
1 x SSD for photography / lightroom / image library
1 x 1tb HDD for games and junk, i also have a VM image on there which i use through Hyper-V for work.

So i have bought a new SSD to hold my VM image as its currently stored on the HDD and is a bit slow to boot up and get going.

My motherboard is an old one, has 3 x SATA6G sockets which the current drive setup was plugged into and worked. I didn't have a spare SATA6G socket for the new SSD so i plugged the HDD into a spare SATA3G socket and put the new SSD in its old SATA6G.

The new drive shows up and i've initialised it. The old HDD has disappeared. I can see it in BIOS, its recognised fine. But windows doesn't see it anymore in file explorer or Disk Management. Any ideas? I did think maybe SATA3G doesnt support a 1TB drive but its recognised in the bios.
 
Anything showing up as unknown in device manager?
 
Some older motherboards used to disable sata ports if specific PCIe slots were used.....nowadays they can share bandwidth.

Is this feasible on your system?
 
Other motherboards don’t always activate their SATA ports as standard, I’m sure there’s a logical reason why but I prefer the other way.

To check whether it’s active is a trip into the BIOS. That’s also a good time to check to see if the BIOS is registering it, if it isn’t then Windows will have no hope.
 
ok so after a bit of blundering round in the bios the SATA ports were set to AHCI mode, i changed that to IDE mode and everything burst into life and got recognised again. A bit of googling would suggest AHCI mode has little effect on SSD drives anyway so i hope this will be ok! Its working at the moment anyway :)
 
IDE is old school legacy, AHCI more modern.
 
Glad to hear that it's working. I do hope that you have adequate backups of the important stuff (your photographs...) and that at least one recent backup is always stored at a different physical location.
 
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