Partition problem with clean install of Win7

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My son has installed a new motherboard etc, and partitioned his new drive; he has 2 other drives in the box, and is having trouble getting Windows 7 to recognise the partitions he just made with its own software. It doesn’t detect them at all. Could this be related to the fact that he has 2 other drives in the box as well? All are formatted properly. He’s tearing his hair out! Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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Do the drives have a drive letter allocated to them?

Easiest way to check is to right click Computer (whether on the desktop or start menu) and select manage. Then click disk management.

Do the drives show up there?

If so, right click on the drive/partition and select change drive letter and paths…

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A freeware program like Partition Wizard Home Edition, or some other should be able to rectify that.
What does Disk Management show? What does it list as the capacity?

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Thanks for this advice; I’ve sent him your replies. He says the new drive now shows up but not the others. I’ll report any further progress! Thanks!

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Best of luck to your friend!

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This may also be a bootloader problem. I use NeoSmart EasyBCD v2to fix bootloader problems. Be advised v2 is a RC (beta) for Win 7. It works fine. It is possible the Win 7 bootloader does not know where to look for the different drives. EasyBCD may help.

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What are not recognized, the drives, or partitions?

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At first it was the partitions, but he fixed that and then the drives weren’t being recognised at bootup. I’ll tell him about Easy BCD – thanks.

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If its booting into Windows and then the drives aren’t visible it could be as simple as the “Hide empty drives in the Computer folder” setting. The setting is under Tools>Folder Options>View. If the menu bar is not set to display in explorer, folder options can also be accessed in Control Panel.

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Try changing the SATA setting in the BIOS to AHCI, or non-RAID (aka IDE) if AHCI is already set.

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thanks to all who helped here: you’re a great bunch! My son found a setting in the motherboard’s BIOS, which asked whether he wanted to let BIOS manage exclusively the slave drives, or let the OS do it – very odd, I thought! And it wasn’t in the manual; he had to search in BIOS itself. But all is well now – can’t tell you which motherboard it was yet, but thanks again for all the suggestions.

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