Solved New Drive won't show in Disk Management

Hi All,

I would really appreciate some expert advise on this issue I have, I am running Windows 8.1 Professional. (and no thats not the issue )

I have just bought myself a new Seagate 5TB internal drive, model is a ST5000DM000. I managed to put the drive as an external and formatted the drive with disk management and also converted the disk to a GPT so it is just one partition as 5TB, the drive will work perfectly fine as an external in a case.

But, if I plug the drive as an internal via SATA cable as a second disk, my bios identifies the drive. Afterwards when Windows tries to boot it takes an additional 3-4 minutes to boot, eventually I log on and the disk is not present nor is it shown in disk management or device manager.

I have tried using different SATA ports on my board (nearly all of them including one that is coloured different which I thought would be my savoir), I am yet to try run it as a secondary drive in another machine which I hope to do in the coming week to see if I can replicate the issue.

Any feedback to this would be sincerely appreciated.

Many thanks

Alex

Format it either as a FAT32 or NTFS partitions. You will have to possibly make it five separate partitions.

Does it show in your device manager as an error under disk drives or storage?

Do you need it as the full 5TB partition?

Try aomei partition manager free to see if it even sees the drive? Could be chipset drivers if it does not see it as well..
How old the the computer? More than 2 years? Are there any windows updates pending?

@broe23 - I have formatted the drive as an NTFS partioin using disk management and I would really prefer to keep the drive as one partition (part of the reason why I bought the disk). If this does work by breaking the partitions into smaller separate ones then I would be disappointed I'm afraid

@Brooklyn567 - From what I remembered it does not even show in device manager at all whatsoever, I will confirm later. I would prefer to have the drive as a 5TB partition as there will be one really large collection of data on the disk, if possible I would really prefer to keep it as one whole partition. I will try use aomei as you recommended but I have doubts it will work since Windows does not even recognize that there is a disk there in the first place, this results in other software I have tried not recognizing it is even there. My PC is about 2 and a half years old, this is the motherboard I am using : 'Asus P8B75-M LX' I haven not run all my Windows Updates yet but will give that a go as well. Would you recommend going onto the Asus site and downloading the latest chipset drivers for my board for Windows 8.1?

Thank you so much for your recommendations, any further advise will also be appreciated.

Kind regards

Hi Guys,

Just an update that I have installed the Chipset drivers for my motherboard from the Asus website - no difference. I can also confirm that the disk does not appear in Device manager as well when it eventually boots.

Starting to think this is a lost cause

Any other ideas? I do suspect it could be my Windows and see if the disk appears when I boot into an install and see if it is listed there because if it is not there either then I will understand more where the problem starts. Something else I noticed was I have fastboot enabled and when I try boot from turning on my rig, I have pause on the bios screen for a short while which does not happen if the disk is not plugged into my machine.

Best regards

What is the mfg & model of the computer or motherboard you are using? Are you using the Pro version of Windows 8? Have you tried converting the drive to GPT, to see if that fixes things?

As I mentioned in my previous post my motherboard is Asus P8B75-M LX, I am running Windows 8.1 Professional. The drive came as an MBR but I converted the drive into a GPT so I could have the very big partition this was all done while it was in an external USB case.

FaceOfFaith said:

As I mentioned in my previous post my motherboard is Asus P8B75-M LX, I am running Windows 8.1 Professional. The drive came as an MBR but I converted the drive into a GPT so I could have the very big partition this was all done while it was in an external USB case.

Click to expand...

Do not know what previous post you are talking about, about the motherboard info posted in. That is why I asked on this thread.

If it worked in an external case, then you know the drive is good. Try another SATA cable for the drive. Make sure the bios is set for AHCI for the drives.

As for one large drive partition, not always wise if using it as a main drive. That is why it is always suggested to break it down into smaller partitions. A drive that large takes a long time to be scanned by A/V software or defragged, because you left it at the 5TB.

Hi broe23,

I can confirm I have tried different SATA cables and different SATA ports that includes one different coloured port which is suppose to be the next generation, I also can confirm my bios is set to IDE not AHCI. I have just discovered this and if I change to AHCI my Windows fails to boot on the loading screen, is there a way around fixing this? Or do I need to reload my Windows with this setting on as if I resort back to IDE I can boot into my Windows again.

Do this before you switch to AHCI :
Change IDE to AHCI
1. Startup "Regedit
2. Open HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE / SYSTEM / CurrentControlset / Services
3. Open msahci
4. In the right field left click on "start" and go to Modify
5. In the value Data field enter "0" and click "ok"
6. exit "Regedit"
7. Reboot Rig and enter BIOS (hold "Delete" key while Booting

Now change In your BIOS select SATA Mode to AHCI from IDE.

You now boot into windows 7 or 8, the OS will recognize AHCI and install the devices. Now the system needs one more reboot and it should work in AHCI mode.
After that you should check if Trim is enabled and Defragmentation for it is off.

Thanks CountMike,I shall try this when I get home. Is the reason I should turn off defragmentation is just for the 5tb because of it being big as I was advised earlier or should I turn off defrag completely for all drives? Sorry for the noob just questions it's just I am not familiar to this.

Thanks again

FaceOfFaith said:

Thanks CountMike,I shall try this when I get home. Is the reason I should turn off defragmentation is just for the 5tb because of it being big as I was advised earlier or should I turn off defrag completely for all drives? Sorry for the noob just questions it's just I am not familiar to this.

Thanks again

Click to expand...

Turning defrag off is a must only for SSDs and so is Trim command. You can disregard those if you do not have SSD. Win8 fragments drives very little so defragmentation is not really necessary anyway and with such large drive it could take long time to do it.

Hi again,

So this is the current state, I have managed to work around get my bios to AHCI without reloading Windows. Now, I get the never ending spinning wheel on start up, if I enable hot swap on a SATA port and plug the drive in while in Windows, the disk does come up in Device manager. However, it does not come up in This PC or in Disk management. Starting to think this is a lost cause and I will need to upgrade my board or even reload Windows maybe? I also forgot to mention my Windows is 64 bit so not that either.

Many thanks as always

Now let me see if I remember it right. Haven't done it for a while because my MB has separate eSATA controller with 4 ports in the back. I think that removable, hot swap drives should be a Dynamic volume. In XP, turning off Write Caching in it's properties made it Dynamic with a caveat not to remove it before cached data is flushed by disconnecting data cable first, waiting few seconds before turning off the power for it. If it's done the other way, data left in cache will be lost and it may come to possible corruption of the file being written at that time.

Hi again CountMike,

Thanks for the post but a little bit confused, are you saying I need to convert my disk to be a Dynamic disk with Disk management? I can access it as an external drive and do it that way, if I do this then plugging the disk via hot swap SATA port will do the trick? Something keeps telling me it has got to do with my motherboard does not accept the new disks or something else is causing it in my Windows for some weird reason.

I will be testing the disk this weekend in a friend's machine to see if it works and should hopefully out line the issue that way.


Thanks

Every SATA port should be able to hot swap disks under certain circumstances but eSATA controllers are made explicitly with hot swap in mind. On the other hand, if you can see hot plugged disks in Device manager, that means BIOS has recognized them and the problem lies in how windows see them.

Hi again Everybody,

So I plugged my drive into my friends computer and sure enough worked perfectly fine. I have also realized that when I plug the drive into my pc on the initial boot the drive comes up in device manager as disabled, if I try to enable the drive I just get the spinning wheel and if I reboot my pc the drive no longer shows up in the bios or obviously device manager.

I have come to the conclusion that my drive is not supported by my board unless you think I am wrong?

I have run into many problems with disks but never because of incompatibility of one disk with one MB but not another.

Some HDDs and SSD, not showing up in BIOS main screen when connected to SATA port in AHCI mode but detected deeper in BIOS menu, where you choose which order of disks is for booting. Work in Widows if formatted right.
Some when power connected thru adapter Molex 4 pin > SATA power.
HDD and DVD on same controller but only once and one MB (this one). Only this combination of drives and only in AHCI mode. Neither was detected by BIOS when together.

Hi again CountMike,

Thanks again for hanging on so long through this with me, the advice is sincerely appreciated. So I removed the drive partition which is now all unallocated space, I plugged the drive in via hot swap which is now showing in Device manager AND in Disk Manegement. However, the drive is shown with arrow down icon and if I try click Initialze or Offline I get the error message 'the system cannot find the file specified'. Any further expertise on this?

FaceOfFaith said:

Hi again CountMike,

Thanks again for hanging on so long through this with me, the advice is sincerely appreciated. So I removed the drive partition which is now all unallocated space, I plugged the drive in via hot swap which is now showing in Device manager AND in Disk Manegement. However, the drive is shown with arrow down icon and if I try click Initialze or Offline I get the error message 'the system cannot find the file specified'. Any further expertise on this?

Click to expand...

Since it is Unallocated space that means no partition is defined, you'll have to make one first and format in NTFS. If it wouldn't thru disk management, Free partition manager software to resize partitions - EaseUS Partition Master Free usually does good job for me.