Basically: Windows update made my 2nd hard drive disappear

This is going to run long, so at first, a resume:

Win10, installed on a clean disk (which is small), with a second drive for real storage (because the first one can hold little except the OS).

Now, I *know* there are driver issues. Regardless, I ran windows update, it found some update to install, and when it was done doing that, my second drive was gone. It's there, of course, and I can make it visible, but not actually use it, because it's reserved.

The long story:

So I bought this computer 3 years ago. It was aging even then. It has a motherboard for which no win10 drivers exist. So that's a thing.

Regardless, it ran fine under win7. When I updated to win10 (it was free), it also ran fine for a long while, then destroyed my hard drive. No preamble or anything, just went from 0 to 100% destruction in an instant.

I installed another hard drive. It destroyed that too. So that was disappointing.

Thing is neither drive is *entirely* destroyed. I can access them every once in a while. So through a herculean effort, I got one of them running. Sort of. It would only boot if there was an installation disk in my dvd drive. And even that, only occasionally.

You realize of course that I'd not have put up with this if replacing the damned thing was an option.

Eventually, I scraped together enough for a new drive.

Installed win10 again. It worked. I got drivers for it that also seem to work. It's a little shaky about running games, but not, as such, prone to spontaneous selfdestruction. Yet.

So I've been running windows update in the vain hope that it'll suddenly realise what drivers I need. Yea.

And then it suddenly (yesterday) told me it had some new update to install.

I'd tell you what it was, except it insists no updates are installed. At all. But after I installed it, my second drive had gone.

Amusingly, it does somewhat feel like my motherboard is doing this to my drives just to spite me.

Anyone have any idea what's going on here?

Like this:

Link: http://speccy.piriform.com/results/R...CQ3Z2V7VFOzgxF

Specs updated.

Pic attached.

Windows Anniversary Update seems to be causing some drives to appear as 'Raw' when they are not.

See this thread:Windows 10 Anniversary update problems, not recognizing external hdd

There were also reports of it in this mammoth thread, where at least one person lost a drive.
Windows 10 Anniversary Update Available August 2

If it's the same as in the first thread I quoted, the cure seems to be to rollback to the previous version of Windows 10.

Well - it sorta worked. I can use the drive again, so that's nice. It's still more than half full, so my files are still *on* there - but they're not showing up.

None too important in the final outcome - I can reinstall them.

Thanks. Sterling effort. I honestly can't believe you zeroed in on the actual solution in the first go =)

.... aaaand I still can't format it. Darn.

Sorry it hasn't worked. I don't know the answer I'm afraid.

But is it better than it was when you posted those screenshots yesterday? What does disk management look like now?

I also wonder what would happened if you tried to access the disk through other means, such as a Linux Live USB or Booting to a Command Line and looking for the drive with the old DIR command. (Note that in the command prompt, all the driver letters will be switched round.)

Well ... since they were both showing up before, I see no reason why it'd be different now.

And no, I ... am not familiar enough with dos or command prompt to have done so.

What's intriguing tho, is that this error has persisted from before I swapped out my drives. While I was trying to get the old drives working, it did the same thing: Told me one drive was reserved, wouldn't let me install on it nor format it.