MISSING SATA HARD DRIVE

[taher]

I have Windows Vista installed on my pc and I also have 2 hard drives installed on it. This hard drive used to work fine for a couple of months, but recently the day before yesterday the second slave drive has now disappeared from the computer. When i go into bios then the same drive is visible, but booting up to Vista desktop the drive is not showing up. I have checked for solution on many website but nothing has helped me so far. So can anyone tell me how do i fix this problem. Thanks

[Dilbert]

Can you tell us whether the slave drive is internal or external hard drive that you are using? Did you try to do anything prior to the disappearance of the drive? You could try to do a System Restore to a time when everything was working fine and see if that can help you out. This problem might be also due to some windows update or patch, so you can never know. Also, if there are no data stored in the disappeared drive then you can go to Control Panel,
Administration Tools, Computer Management, then Select Disk Management. Here if the drive is showing up then you can use the disk management to set up the drive and see if it fixed the problem.

[Scott2580]

Microsoft has recently released the service pack 1 update for Windows Vista, you could try installing that and if that corrects the minor bug of not recognizing the hard drive. Go to Control Panel > Administative options > Computer Management and then under storage, it will give you options for primary drive and an unallocated drive. You just have to right click on the unallocated drive and use the option to allocate it. Then you will get a prompt for formatting the drive, just do it and then see if the drive is usable again or not.

[agarwalm11]

If you have an internal drive then I dont think that it will require any sort of drivers or such. You see, the Sata controller is already onboard on the motherboard, so downloading drivers from the manufacturer's website and installing the same is of no use. But there is something that can be done by upgrading the firmware of the hard drive which could solve this issue.