Disk Management Cannot Locate Storage Drives in New Build

Captain Ron

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May 23, 2011
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So I've just built a new Windows 7 Ultimate x64 system with the following components:
ASRock P67 Extreme4 Motherboard
Intel Core i5-2500K Processor
OCZ Agility 2 Series 90 GB SATA II 3.5-Inch Solid State Drive (SSD) OCZSSD3-2AGT90G System Drive
2 Seagate Barracuda XT ST33000651AS 3TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s Storage Drives

I installed Windows on the SSD with absolutely no difficulty. But when I went to create storage partitions on the Seagate drives, only the SSD shows up in Windows Disk Management.

The Seagate drives appear under both the Windows Installer and UEFI configuration, but no where else.

Troubleshooting steps done:
SATA cables checked
SATA devices moved around to different SATA ports
Removed and reinstalled the most recent drivers for both the Intel SATA RAID controller and the Marvell SATA Controller

Any thoughts? I've spent most of the day banging my head against this one.
 

Captain Ron

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Some motherboards have more than one SATA controller chip, and the second chip can often be disabled in the BIOS. Have a look at your motherboard manual to see if this is possible and how to enable the second controller.

There are two controller chips on this motherboard. One Intel and one Marvell. I've confirmed that both are enabled. I've also swapped the positions of the drives Windows can see (The SSD and the DVD drive), with the two it can't (The two Seagate HDDs). The devices appeared in the appropriate locations in UEFI, but Windows Disk Manager still could only see the SSD and DVD drive.
 

Captain Ron

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There's nothing to scroll to. I've looked in the Volume List, the Disk List, and the Graphical View and the only things that appear are the SSD and DVD drive with lots of blank space below.
 


And the SSD appears twice in the middle pane, right? Once as a line a the top and again as a partition map further down.

Are the drives and the motherboard SATA ports the same SATA version? SATA is supposed to be backward compatible, but occasionally you get particular combinations of drive/motherboard chipsets that don't play nicely together. Most drives have a jumper to force their speed down to eliminate the need to autonegotiate the fastest common speed between the port and the drive. If your drives have such a jumper you could give it a try.
 

Captain Ron

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The SSD does appear in both places.

The motherboard has connections for both 3 and 6Gbps. The Seagate drives are SATA 6Gbps and the SSD is 3Gbps and are matched up to the corresponding SATA ports. However, I have tried swapping them around and no change.

There is a jumper on the Seagate drives that will limit data transfer to 1.5Gbps, which I have tried, again with all combinations of SATA ports, no change.
 
I'm running out of ideas. The next thing I might try is to download and burn a LiveCD version of one of the Linux distributions such as Fedora or Ubuntu, boot from the CD and see if that OS can see the drive. That might help narrow it down to being a hardware vs. a Windows problem.