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Windows doesn't recognize HDD.

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Deozaan:
Hi folks,

I recently found some old HDDs and decided to put them into my pc to see if they still worked. After all, I had them removed because I thought (but wasn't sure) that they were going bad so they were replaced with new HDDs.

Anyway, I've got one that is recognized in the BIOS but doesn't show up in Windows 7, not even in the disk management. I thought that was a little strange, so I booted into an Ubunto LiveCD and Ubuntu at least recognizes there is an HDD there. It doesn't display the contents of the drive but it tells me the label and even knows enough to say it may be failing since it has a lot of bad sectors.

So I tried booting back into Windows 7 and before it booted, it made me run scandisk/check disk on that drive, and as expected, found a bunch of bad sectors and unreadable files and stuff, but when it finally finished booting into Win7 it once again does not indicate the drive exists at all.

I figure the drive is toast, and I certainly don't care about salvaging whatever data may be on it, but I'm really interested in finding out why the drive just seems to disappear in Win7 (ultimate, 32-bit) but everything else (BIOS, Linux) recognizes the drive is there.

Anyone got any ideas?

lanux128:
maybe partition table is broken since Ubuntu also can't read the HDD info in full, try something like TestDisk to view/fix partition headers. most likely there's bad sectors abound, as you've already mentioned.

Target:
your only goal at this point is to see if windows will recognise them, so the first step is to make sure you have a valid partition. 

given that you're not interested in any data that might be on those drives my approach would be run the partitioning tool of choice over it and create new partitions (if you can - if not, then you can be pretty sure you don't need to go any further ;)).

you can then clean up any dud sectors in windows afterwards if you decide you want to use them...

Deozaan:
I used GParted from the Ubuntu Live CD to format it to FAT32, then back to NTFS. It showed it still somehow had about 75MB of data used on the partition, so I deleted the partition completely and created a new NTFS partition and it still has the data (though no files show up when browsing the HDDs contents).

So I booted back into Windows and it now shows up in Explorer. :Thmbsup: I'm running a full scandisk/check disk/whatever on it now. Thanks!

I wonder what the phantom 75MB is.

f0dder:
I wonder what the phantom 75MB is.-Deozaan (March 15, 2010, 01:57 AM)
--- End quote ---
Bad cluster map? That'd be a helluvalot of bad clusters tho :P

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