Saturday, February 8, 2014

Windows 7: Secondary Hard Drive Shows Up in Bios, but does not show up in My Computer

I recently installed a second SATA hard drive on a client's computer.  I have done this a thousand times but for some reason, the computer would detect the hard drive, but not allow it to be displayed in the "Computer" section of Windows 7.  After a little Googling, I came across a YouTube video that helped fix the issue, and it only took seconds.  Please be careful following other advice out their.  Many of the sites I came across mentioned formatting the hard drive.  This would have been fine except that I needed the secondary hard drive to not be formatted because it contained the client's old information.

1.  Go to "computer management."  You can get there by right clicking on "Computer" and then selecting the "Manage" option.

2.  Click on "Disk Management."  You should now see a list of all the hard drives that are connected.  Find the drive that currently isn't displaying.  You might find the error "The disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online."  That is the drive you want to fix.  

3. Right click on it and and select the "Online" option.  That should be it. 

Below is the Youtube video that put me in the right place.