New hard disc not recognised in windows 7

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wod

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I hope someone can help me with this.

Basically I bought a new hard disc and a copy of windows 7 home premium to upgrade my pc.

anyway the new disc is going to be a data disc and windows 7 is installed on another hard disc.

In windows the new hard disc isn't even showing up so I can format the disc.

The new disc is a 2tb seagate sata3, these new discs are backwards compatible aren't they ?

in the bios the hard disc is correctly listed with my two other hard discs.

Any ideas that I can try ?
 
Daft as it might sound, try doing a windows update.

I have had stuff before that hasn't been seen in windows. I've left it in the PC and after the PC has done its nightly update it was showing in the device manager.

Worth a shot either way.

Nano
 
Yes.

i had a degree of trouble getting a spare HDD recognised (Didn't show up in "My Complicator" etc.) and, if I recall correctly, I had to faff around in Windows Disc Management to Format, Create Partition etc.

Go to the Search box and type in Disk Management (US spelling appears essential): It will come back with Create & Format Disk Partitions. The new Disc (Disk!) should show up there and you will have tools available to get it sorted.

A key step is to toggle it to "Online".

All fairly intuitive.

After that, it should show up in the usual way(s) and places and be usable as you wish.
 
thanks for replies so far.

Further investigating of this, the weird thing is the disc is listed under the hard discs in device manager ?

In computer management on windows 7 it seems to be called virtual disk now but clicking on it nothing seems to happen.

I've tried turning on virtual disc in the services list but now I get an error 1067 ?

I've only just installed win 7 it can't be corrupted already :(
 
Take steps as in my Post above ................... Ignore the Virtual Disk stuff, Device Manager, Services etc.

In Disk Management, if that Drive has somehow acquired some odd parameters, you can simply start again from scratch.
 
wod said:
The new disc is a 2tb seagate sata3, these new discs are backwards compatible aren't they ? in the bios the hard disc is correctly listed with my two other hard discs. Any ideas that I can try ?
Click to expand...
I'll give you a tenner for it.
 
You may need to mark the disk as 'active' in disk management by right clicking on the disk and selecting it. An alternative would be to use a linux live distro like ubuntu and format the disk using gparted. Also parted magic on the ultimate boot cd should work.
 
Yes, I was going to put "Active" in Post #2, but thought I'd check what Win 7 says and it came up with "Online".

Still, same thing!

The problem with Win 7 is that the powerful Disk Management feature is well hidden and difficult to find using normal menu trees - hence suggesting using the Search box.

But once you've got it going, there's a nice practical representation on view, and an easily understood set of functions to hand.
 
The problem with Win 7 is that the powerful Disk Management feature is well hidden and difficult to find using normal menu trees - hence suggesting using the Search box.
Click to expand...
Does it not come up as an option if you right click Computer in the start menu?
 
thank for other replies.

I will try the disc management, I'm so used to xp pro that I would right click my computer icon, choose manage and go through it that way to do it in xp.

Also going to run SFC /scannow to check the system files but its a new install so shouldn't have anything wrong with those files.

I will report back later.
 
@PaulR:

Nope.

I had the exact same issue as wod and spent some considerable Googling and playing time figuring it out - Ultimately easy, of course (Isn't it always!).

@wod: Disk, not Disc .......................... !!!



PS: Mine is Starter, not Premium, so I can't state with certainty that there isn't another entry to the feature for wod, but certainly using the Search box will produce the goods.
 
I'm running the updates at the moment to see if there is any change because there is rather a lot of them well over 100 updates.

diskmgmt.msc I will try next before a full reinstall

one thing I do know is think I need to add more ram seems sluggish on 2gb ?
 
SWMBO's Lappie ran Win 7 Premium 64 Bit on 3GB RAM until the HDD failed, and that was pretty much ok. Now running exclusively Crunchbang Linux. That runs happily in less than 500MB RAM.

My Netbook runs Win 7 Starter 32 Bit and was tricky with the OEM 1GB RAM: I put another 1GB in it and it's fine (Mind you, I use Crunchbang Linux mainly!).
 
Looks like I'm going to have to reinstall 7.

Just can't get disk management to work at all.

It just says unable to connect to virtual disk.

I'm not sure where to go from here.
 
Nor me. Haven't a clue what a Virtual Disc is or how to render it normal!
 
Virtual disk is what disk management uses to run.

It's listed in the services list and for some reason it just won't start the process to allow me to use disk management.

looks like I will have to try a reinstall ?
 
Before doing that, can you try formatting/partitioning it in another machine ?

What is it currently formatted as (NTFS/FAT) ?
 
I've got the new hard disc recognised in windows now.

I put the windows install cd in and went through the setup menus as if I was going to install windows 7 and I clicked on the hard disc in the list and chose format.

I cancelled the setup process and now the disc shows in my computer.

I still can't use the diskmgmt.msc program to view my hard disc drives.
 
All these unnecessary difficulties and quirks are part of the reason why I (and no doubt many others!) have largely forsaken Windows in favour of a decent Operating System!

Sadly, for some Applications, it's still essential to at least have Windows available - despite my best efforts to dispense with it entirely.
 
yeah, it's bothering me as to why I can't get disk management to work.

I did actually reinstall windows 7 last night which made no difference what so ever.

could it be a hardware fault developing somewhere ?
 
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