Having a problem with 2nd HDD

[pdmartin]

A power surge cooked my main drive. I had a 2nd drive that I just used for storage. After buying a new drive and installing windows 7 I put the 2nd drive back in.
I got a balloon pop up and tell me the device driver is being installed. Now it shows up in the device manager and the system tells me the drive is in and working. I even downloaded Seagate Tools and ran a scan on the drive. It passed and again it was reported as working fine.
Now here is where the problem is. I can't visually find the drive and it doesn't show up in the BIOS.
It's there but I can't do anything with it.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, pdmartin!

I'd recommend you to go to Disk Management and check if the secondary HDD is listed there. If it's a brand new drive, it should be listed as Unallocated (with a black bar). In order to be able to access it, you need to INITIALIZE it and then PARTITION & FORMAT it from the Disk Management built-in tool in Windows.

If it's not showing up there, I'd suggest you to try reseating the SATA cable connecting the drive to the motherboard and even try using a different one or at least a different port on the mobo.

Keep me posted. Hope this helps!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[SkyNetRising]

I understood that old drive has data on it.
So - no partitioning or formatting!
Just go to Disk Management and assign drive letter to your secondary drive.