Hard drive not appearing in BIOS after PC upgrade

arisutan · 18 Nov 2015

Hi everyone, [moving this thread from sevenforums to here!]

I know there are a lot of threads about this already but I read a lot and none have helped me. I just did a complete upgrade of my PC replacing motherboard, video card, processor and power supply but keeping original hard drives. I did a fresh install of Windows 7 and then upgraded to Windows 10 soon after completely smoothly with no issues. My boot drive and external survived, but for some reason, even though it was handled with great care, my other SATA hard drive doesn't appear anywhere anymore. I can hear it spin when I boot the PC but it doesn't appear in BIOS or in Disk Management. I changed the cable and the port it was plugged into but no dice.

IF it is indeed dead...what are my options in recovering the files? It is essential I get these files back!

Thanks in advance!

//it kind of worked on and off when plugged into my brother's PC which uses a different make of motherboard (I believe American Megatrends) but it seems like in the end it IT dead after all, just not quite lol)

spapakons · 18 Nov 2015

Relax! Windows Update messed with all drivers during upgrade. All you need is to reinstall the SATA controller driver (if applicable) to make Windows see your disks again. IF there is no standalone SATA driver, then you need to install the chipset drivers which contain that and other system devices.

jds63 · 18 Nov 2015

Truthfully from what i know, hard drive will still be recognized in the BIOS without the drivers for controller ,as the other drives show . So good chances that drive did not survive and is bad. I had this issue before my drive use to disappear on me in explorer and the BIOS. If changing ports and cables did not help, then it would be the drive. As far as recovery i am not positive on how, first believe there is a way to hook it up through USB, but if dead going to be hard.

spapakons · 18 Nov 2015

Let's think positive :) It is not dead. In worst case it may have lost the partition data and cannot detect your files. There are recovery programs that ignore the partition table and search sector-by-sector allowing you to copy your data to another disk.

jds63 · 18 Nov 2015

spapakons said:

Let's think positive :) It is not dead. In worst case it may have lost the partition data and cannot detect your files. There are recovery programs that ignore the partition table and search sector-by-sector allowing you to copy your data to another disk.

Yes, always try to remain positive. As far as part for trying to recover the files, this i can not say for sure how to go about it and if it is possible.

bobkn · 18 Nov 2015

My first step would be to remove the malfunctioning SATA drive and stick it in an external drive dock. (Maybe that's because I own an external drive dock. They are not expensive.) If you can't detect the drive in that, you probably have a hardware failure.

Best of luck. It would be nasty to use the word "backup" at this late date, I suppose.

CountMike · 19 Nov 2015

IF it's not appearing in BIOS it's either connected wrong or it's electronics are fried. Windows or any other OS will not know about it. There is a slight chance that change of bus on MB would help. Also if controller in BIOS is set to AHCI or RAID, older HDDs may not like it.
Also try changing data cable, they are known to fail.

bobkn · 19 Nov 2015

CountMike said:

Also try changing data cable, they are known to fail.

I suggest re-reading post #1. That's already been tried, along with changing SATA ports.

jds63 · 19 Nov 2015

Decent board http://www.gigabyte.com/products/pro...px?pid=4965#ov

CountMike · 19 Nov 2015

bobkn said:

I suggest re-reading post #1. That's already been tried, along with changing SATA ports.

Well, excuse mua for living, must have missed one word. Maybe you should save your keyboard wear with such smart comments.