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Windows can't see hard drive

I have a My Book WD external drive. The drive has not been detected by the usb cable lately, so I took the drive out of it's case and connected it directly with the desktop's SATA cable. Now the drive is showing up in the BIOS, but Windows 8.1 does not show it.

becraig

Try this

When in windows

windows key + r compmgmt.msc

Click on Disk Management

In the top menu click Action and then Rescan disks

See if your drive shows up.

a1electric

ASKER

No, didn't show up

becraig

Can you go into Control Panel - System - Device Manager - Disk drives and see if your external WD drive shows up there.

a1electric

ASKER

No, the WD drive doesn't show up in device manager.

becraig

One of two options, you can scan for new hardware, or do a legacy install and point to the drivers for the disk and try to install and see if windows picks it up.

McKnife

Then there are two possible reasons:
-the drive is dead (though still recognizable at BIOS level which is indeed possible)
-the sata controller of the mainboard does not like your drive (maybe it's a very large one and the driver of the controller has limits like not being able to recognize drives greater than 2 TB - could be)

So I would try at least another sata controller in another computer.

a1electric

ASKER

I don't know if this helps, but here's a picture of the BIOS info. The second line would be the WD drive.
WD-Bios-info.jpg

McKnife

No, that info does not really help though it at least shows that the recognized product ID is indeed that of a 500 GB drive (which should be recognized by any controller that knows sata2 - yours obviously does).

Connect it to another machine and/or see whether offline disk diagnostic tools from Seagate can "talk" to the drive.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

nobus

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McKnife

Next time go for a fairer division of points, please.