Question Secondary Hard Drive Not Showing in Windows or BIOS after Windows update

[ericsinger]

Hello friends,

A friend of mine's laptop, an MSi gaming laptop, has two drives, one SSD for Windows OS, and a HDD for storage purposes. They said their laptop had a Windows update last night, and this morning turned it on to find out that the secondary hard drive, the storage drive, is no longer visible. It does not show up in device manager. Because they're not local to me, I walked them through going into the BIOS/UEFI. Just as I feared, the drive does not show up on the list.

They do not report any bad drive performance or any unusual sounds before the drive suddenly disappeared. I explained that if it is not showing up in the BIOS, this means the drive may either be disconnected, is connected to now a bad port, has a bad cable, or worst case scenario, the drive is dead.

My question is, this hard drive is not the boot device, and does not have Windows installed on it... it is just a storage device. So, why after a Windows 10 update, the secondary drive is no longer visible within Windows or the BIOS? Is it just a coincidence, or could that somehow have created a problem?

 

[mazooni]

The concerning part of this is that it is not detected in bios. You can try to see if it is detected in Windows within disk management. You can open disk management by typing this in run menu diskmgmt.msc
It will probably just work from the start menu as well. If the hard drive is there do not format it as that will cause data loss. If a drive letter is not assigned you should assign one as a missing drive letter is often the cause of Windows not showing a drive and I have seen this issue after a Windows update. Again though it is concerning that it is not detected in bios and this will most likely not work but still worth a try. If possible you should remove the drive and see if it works in another PC. It is possible his drive connector is dead and not the actual drive.