Hard drive shows in device manager but is not showing up in disk management to assign a letter

Luticman

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May 9, 2015
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I have a new hard drive that is the exact same as a hard drive already working in my computer.
When I went to initialize it and assign a drive letter in disk management, it was not on the list. I have updated my SATA drivers for my motherboard. I have tried disabling and re-enabling the drive in device manager. I have put it in another computer with the same results. I also installed "SeaTools" from seagate to test if the drive is even operational and it doesn't show up in there either. My BIOS and device manager see it. I just want to initialize the drive and assign a letter to make it a usable volume. It has no data on it and has never been initialized. Fresh from the factory.
 
Solution
Hi there Luticman,

This sounds a lot like a driver issue.
What is your MOBO? You need to make sure you have installed the right drivers.
Apart from that, you can try attaching the drive to another port. You can use different SATA and power cables as well.

Another thing you can try is to reset your BIOS settings.
Check these out:
http://www.howtogeek.com/131623/how-to-clear-your-computers-cmos-to-reset-bios-settings/
http://www.wikihow.com/Reset-Your-BIOS

If nothing helps, just try the drive on another system. There may be something wrong with this one. :)

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD
Hi there Luticman,

This sounds a lot like a driver issue.
What is your MOBO? You need to make sure you have installed the right drivers.
Apart from that, you can try attaching the drive to another port. You can use different SATA and power cables as well.

Another thing you can try is to reset your BIOS settings.
Check these out:
http://www.howtogeek.com/131623/how-to-clear-your-computers-cmos-to-reset-bios-settings/
http://www.wikihow.com/Reset-Your-BIOS

If nothing helps, just try the drive on another system. There may be something wrong with this one. :)

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD
 
Solution

Luticman

Reputable
May 9, 2015
3
0
4,510


I've reset my BIOS and have tried a different SATA cable. I tried the drive on another computer with the same issue. I'm thinking it may be a bad pointer on the drive as the system recognizes that it is a drive, but when I go to it's properties in device manager and select the volumes tab and click populate (usually all the drive's volume data is displayed on a normal functioning drive) an error shows "Volume information for this disk cannot be found."
 

Luticman

Reputable
May 9, 2015
3
0
4,510
So I got it to work. I made a quick bootable Ubuntu USB drive so that I could edit the hard drive's data via the terminal. I deleted a partition (which there shouldn't have been one on there as it was a new bare drive) and created a new one. Then booted back into Windows where disk manager had no problem seeing it this time. So from there I deleted the partition I created in Ubuntu and reinitiated the drive to assign a drive letter in Windows. Made me remember how much I liked Linux from back in college. Why couldn't I do that in Windows? Useless...