HD "missing" after Vista install

msdunkel

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I've got 4 SATA hard drives which all worked properly before I installed Vista 64. I now have 3 that Vista recognizes. The missing drive is a 320G WD SATA 3.0 drive. The "missing" drive shows up in the BIOS and is listed under the device manager. The device manager says the disk is working, and when I tried to update the driver I got a message that the drive was already up to date. The disk does not show up under disk management. The data on the disk is extremely important to me so a reformat without saving the data is out of the question. Any ideas on getting Vista to play nice with my 4th HD?

Thanks in advance!
 

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CORRECTION:

The disk shows as disk 0, a dynamic disk and is inactive. I tried to convert to basic disk and it said I'd lose my data so I canceled.
 

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MSdunkel,

i hope you generally do not use dynamic disks since there is no benefit here (i tried this before).

you should give more info here, probably not for me, but for others who are used to play with the combo you mention.

Where is your Vista on?

François
 

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I remember this when I installed Vista - Only the Vista installed drive was present. Basically, the drive was present in the device manager, but never came up as a drive in explorer, etc.

From what I remember, I had to do a quick format so that it would be Vista usable. I can't remember where I did this, I think in admin control panel somewhere.

If you want to get the data first, then either dual boot and backup from Vista, or move drive to another XP machine and backup. Sounds like lots of work unfortunately!

I've got 4 SATA hard drives which all worked properly before I installed Vista 64. I now have 3 that Vista recognizes. The missing drive is a 320G WD SATA 3.0 drive. The "missing" drive shows up in the BIOS and is listed under the device manager. The device manager says the disk is working, and when I tried to update the driver I got a message that the drive was already up to date. The disk does not show up under disk management. The data on the disk is extremely important to me so a reformat without saving the data is out of the question. Any ideas on getting Vista to play nice with my 4th HD?

Thanks in advance!
 

My Computer

I ended up fixing this myself in a fashion very similar to the last poster.

I've never made a dynamic drive on purpose, but for some reason Vista just decided that my data drive was dynamic. The fix was extremely easy if just a bit tedious. I cracked open the case and disabled my 1TB drive (with Vista), then I made my old XP media drive the first boot priority in the BIOS (I probably could've just done this without even DCing the Vista drive but I didn't want to take any chances of corrupting it with Media Center drivers).

When I did this the 320G "missing" hd was there. I transferred all the data from the 320G to a 250G (my 4th SATA drive). From there I reconnected the 1TB and made it the 1st boot priority then copied from the 250G to the 1TB drive. *phew*

Glad I've got all my data safely backed up, now I just need to reformat the 320G and I should be good to go.
 

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I have same problem. I look on google, and found this solution.
Download the utility, follow the screenshots, restart and whoalaaa, disk is now listed as basic and all data are intact.
 

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