New HDD shows up in BIOS but not in Device Manager

[worlebird]

I am adding a new Seagate 3TB SATA HDD to my Windows 8.1 64 bit system. The drive appears fine in the BIOS, which reports the size correctly. Windows, however, can't see the drive at all - it doesn't even show up under "Disk Drives" in Device Manager. Tried a few tools from Seagate, and none of them can see the drive.

I also tried putting the drive in an external USB enclosure, to test it. That showed up ok - I could even format it (which I then did). It only showed up as 742 GB, but that's probably because the external enclosure is old. Put the drive back in the PC, use a different SATA port (just in case), nothing. Again, BIOS sees it just fine.

I've looked at several questions on here, and none have helped at all.
Any suggestions? I have a Tweet out to Seagate - we'll see if they reply. I'll have to wait for Monday to use their phone support.

 

[jitpublisher]

Does it show up under control panel, computer management, disk management? You have to go there, format, partition, and assign a drive letter before it will show up in Windows.

 

[worlebird]

Does it show up under control panel, computer management, disk management? You have to go there, format, partition, and assign a drive letter before it will show up in Windows.

No, it doesn't. It's not in Disk Management, and it's also not in Device Manager.

 

[worlebird]

Ok, well, it looks like I've solved my own problem.
This is the third hard drive in this machine - the first (boot) is an SSD, the second is an HDD data drive. The SATA cable I used for this new drive is an older one I had lying around, so I wondered if perhaps there was a problem with it. I swapped the SATA cables on the two HDDs, and voila, both drives show up in Disk Manager now. This seems a little odd - I might expect the new drive to show up and the older drive to go away, but they are both there now. I was able to extend the 742 GB partition I had created while the disk was in the external enclosure, and how the thing works and I have the full 3 TB.

I had believed that SATA cables were pretty much all the same, but this might indicate that is not the case. The existing HDD is obviously older than this new one, and so perhaps the older cable is fine for it. I'm not sure what the transfer rate is on that existing drive, but the new one is a 6Gb/s drive. Perhaps the old cable couldn't support that rate? Really not sure, but things seem to be working fine now.