OS Not Recognizing Drives

Andreas.96 · 12 May 2015 at 22:29

As the title suggest two of my SATA drives are not being recognized by Windows 8.1.

I have a Gigabyte Z97X-SLI and the two drives in question are a WD Red and a Pioneer BluRay drive. My boot drive (an 850 EVO) is being recognized just fine.

Initially it was only my WD Red that wasn't showing up (I could still see it in Computer Management but it would not appear as a drive in This PC) and I was told I would probably have to format it so I did.

Unfortunately this did not fix the problem so I moved onto looking at which SATA ports I'd connected them to. I moved them around and plugged them into different ports but now the OS won't recognize my BluRay drive or my WD and I can no longer see them in Computer Management.

However they still show as being connected in the BIOS, it says drives are connected to ports 2,3 and 5.

So does anyone have any ideas? For all I know I've missed something really simple and it'll be a quick fix.

Thanks for any help in advance,
Andreas

ED209 · 12 May 2015 at 22:31

does the drive have a drive letter assigned to it or make sure its not assigned a drive letter that is in use.

this can be changed in disk management

Andreas.96 · 13 May 2015 at 16:28

Thank you for your response, the drive won't even appear in Disk management.

wazza300 · 13 May 2015 at 21:31

are you on the latest motherboard bios? also try enabling sata hot swap for sata each port in the bios,might show up then

Andreas.96 · 14 May 2015 at 16:26

Yes I'm on the latest bios. I have enabled hot swap but still nothing.

I'm going to try the one drive at a time in some different ports to see if that helps.

This has got me baffled :confused:

ED209 · 14 May 2015 at 16:32

have you tried a different sata cable?

Andreas.96 · 14 May 2015 at 17:12

I have fixed it, more by fluke than anything I actually did methinks.

So I took the cables out and then tried the boot drive in another port to make sure it worked then connected the other drives one at a time (first one then turn power off, then the other). They both reappeared in Computer Management so happy days

Then all I had to do was assign a drive letter to the HDD (I don't know how I missed this first time round) and tada! It works

Thanks for all your help anyways

ED209 · 14 May 2015 at 17:19

excellent, glad its working