Second Hard Drive Apparently Undetected

S

SirDeity

Big Geek
Hello. I have a second internal hard drive which I use for data storage. It worked just fine up until I reformatted today. Now, after a fresh reformat where I deleted (wiped) every drive and every partition listed, only the one C drive is currently listed under Hard Disk Drives.

I checked device manager and opened the "Disk drives" tree which shows "ST3500418ASm ATA Device" and "WDC WD6400AAKS-00A7B0 ATA Device." I'm assuming (based on a very brief google search of each of the aforementioned models) this means my computer is recognizing both hard drives. Neither of them show an exclamation mark to indicate there are any problems. Both say their drivers are up-to-date. I already went into folder options to uncheck the box asking to hide empty drives. But despite all of this, only one of them shows up on my list of accessible drives under "Computer."

I vaguely recall experiencing something like this years ago, but I don't remember the solution. I suspect it is a simple one, though. Perhaps I need to format the recently deleted drive (prior to installing windows 7 64-bit). I'm not sure how to do this though. Is it something I'm supposed to do in the BIOS? I'd like some suggestions before I risk aimlessly exploring through my BIOS and potentially causing problems. Thanks!
 
Did you format the drive using your Windows installation CD? It looks like you didn't create a new partition after you deleted the old one. Although it is detected by Device Manager, you won't be able to access the drive until you create a new partition.
Click start, run. Type "diskmgmt.msc". Once Disk Management is loaded, look for the drive that isn't showing up (either the ST3500418ASm ATA Device or WDC WD6400AAKS-00A7B0). That drive will show a big box with "Unallocated Space". Right click that region and select New Simple Volume. The wizard will pop up and guide you through! When you're prompted to select a size in MB for the partition, select the maximum allowed.
 
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