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Saajid Ismail
Asked: 2011-04-06 23:40:22 +0800 CST

Windows not picking up hard drive, but BIOS does

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I have a Windows Server 2003 box, with 2 identical hard drives installed (not in a RAID array).

For some reason, Windows just stopped recognising the second hard drive. It doesn't appear in My Computer or Windows Disk Management. However, when booting the server up, if I go into my BIOS settings, the BIOS does pick up the hard drive.

What could be the problem? How do I troubleshoot this? Are there any free tools available that I can use to diagnose and fix this problem?

hard-drive windows-server-2003 bios boot

2 Answers

  1. First thing I would do is boot up a Linux boot disk and see if the drive shows up in that. Then use smartmontools, "smartcrl -a /dev/sda" or /dev/sdb and see if the drive reports any Smart errors. If it does, then replace the drive, if no errors are found, have it run a full test on itself. "smartctl -t long /dev/sda.

    If the drive itself is good, then it might be a file system issue.

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  2. You can not assume that guy has linux box..

    I think 1) your disk is there but might be accidentally formatted to unknown file system. 2) partition table is corrupted 3) did you change the drive connections? are both drive as proper master slave combination?

    I suggest to install some partition manager software (I prefer paragon partition manager) and check the disk.

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