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The drive in question is a 3TB SATA Seagate (ST3000DM001-9YN166; Firmware: CC4H) hard disk drive and my system is Windows 7 64-bit.

I had some GPU trouble a while back and required to hard-reset a few times because video output would freeze; driver updated a dying GPU killed it, tried getting helped, each time I “tried” a fix, I would need to hard-reset to get back into windows to try another driver version.

After giving up and removing the GPU and returning to Windows, one of my drives disappeared.

I’ve tried TestDisk and Diskpart, neither can even see the drive.

I have it running on my external USB enclosure, one of the partitions of 4 became RAW. I’ve since formatted it and left it as unallocated under the assumption theres most likely a bad sector in that region.

I’ve tried putting the drive back into my PC and it still cannot be seen by Windows.

Any suggestions as to why the drive is not recognized when connected to the PC via SATA but works fine in an external USB 3.0 enclosure?
One of the partitions is a main data drive letter so I'm constantly writing/reading from it, its working right now in the enclosure.

Canadian Luke
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HyeVltg3
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1 Answers1

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I see two possible culprits:

  1. The disk is not getting adequate power to spin up. If the disk drive has been degrading, it might require more power to spin up than usual. USB 3.0 may be providing adequate power. Check power cables also.
  2. You somehow wrote your boot sector files to the secondary hard drive. In this case, it should be visible by Disk Management but not Windows Explorer.

The following steps will erase the hard drive if used. I recently encountered the second case with a hidden drive. I could see it but only in Disk Management and could mount the drive and access the contents through it. I attempted to format it at the command prompt:

    diskpart
    list vol
    sel vol x, where `x' is the volume number associated with the drive 
    clean

If the drive contains the boot sector, it will not let you clean the drive.

In the case of number two above, you'll need to migrate the boot sector files from the secondary hard drive to the primary. Found this SO answer which should help with case #2

Community
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Austin Sanderson
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