How to restore visibility of your hard drive in Windows. Windows can't see my hard drive Fix details

Recently I received a comment in which a user had a problem installing Windows on a PC; it turns out that the installer does not see HDD, so it is not clear where to install the system. Below in the installer the cause of the error is described, which tells us that the driver is missing disk media and it needs to be downloaded.

The problem is common and I want to write a short instruction to help people solve it. Let's figure it out.

Find drivers for your hard drive

Modern computers, or rather laptops, having Intel processor, then on their website you can find necessary drivers. To make it easier, you can enter the following in any search engine: “Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) Driver”. In the results you can search for the necessary drivers for any operating system.

If you have an AMD processor in your laptop, you can search for drivers using the following query: “SATA/RAID driver (or laptop).”

You can find drivers on the Internet if you simply enter your laptop model or motherboard computer.

Installing a driver if Windows does not see the hard drive during installation

Next comes the most interesting part. After you have downloaded the driver, you need to transfer it to, in our case, the flash drive from which you are going to install Windows. Even if you use a bootable DVD, still place the driver on a flash drive and then insert it into your computer. Placing the driver on disk will prevent you from installing it properly.

Start downloading from the flash drive or disk until the installer appears. Then click on the button.


A window will appear where you need to specify the path to the driver, this is our flash drive, click OK. The driver installation will begin, and then you should see your disks and partitions, if, of course, everything was successful.


As a note, I would like to say that if you are installing Windows on your computer for the first time, and after installing the drivers, 3 or more partitions appear in the installer, then you do not need to delete them, format them, or do other actions with them. Manipulations can be carried out only with the largest section. The fact is that the remaining sections are important, since they store data on which will help.

If you yourself cannot do everything that I have written here, then contact specialists and they will be able to fix everything for you for a fee.

The last option is to use another Windows builds. Perhaps due to the curvature of your assembly, the installer does not see the disks, try it.

I think we can finish here, I hope that this guide will help you in solving the problem with installing Windows.

This article explains in detail what to do if Windows 7 does not see the hard drive. You will also learn how to deal with errors and problems that arise when reinstalling the operating system. Windows systems.

This is information that will be useful for everyone to know, because in our time Personal Computer found in almost every home. Moreover, most often it is Windows that is used as the operating system. Simply put, if you have problems with the operating system while working on your computer, then this article will help you. Let's look at the situation when the system does not see the hard drive. Initially, you will need to perform a couple of simple steps:

Find the “My Computer” shortcut on your desktop, hover your mouse over it and click right click. A menu will appear in which you need to click on the “Management” line (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – Context menu

In the “Computer Management” window that opens, click on the “Disk Management” line from the “Storage Devices” category (Figure 2).

Figure 2 - Computer management

Figure 3 - Change drive letter

Now all that remains is to change the drive letters so that the OS can find it. Also, those who installed Windows 7 instead of Windows XP can move the settings of programs installed on the computer and the “My Documents” folder to the Windows system directory, which will allow them to use the new OS. Hard drive not detected during Windows reinstallation

Quite often during reinstallation Windows users They are faced with the problem that the hard drive is not detected. There are several ways to fix this problem.

Method 1. The most famous method is to disable AHCI in the operating system through the BIOS ( basic system input/output). Immediately after you do this, the computer will be able to detect the hard drive. Now let's describe in more detail how to do this:
1. Restart your computer. Press “F2” or “Delete” on your keyboard from the moment it starts to turn on. This will take you to the BIOS settings.
2. Select the operating system settings menu and turn off AHCI mode, as shown in (Figure 4).

Figure 4 - Disabling AHCI

Method 2. It may well be that the computer does not see the hard drive due to problems with motherboard(when reinstalling any version of Windows). In this case, you need to download the driver for the motherboard of your computer on the Internet and burn it to disk. Next, using this disk, add the driver to the root directory of the operating system.

This is done as follows:
1. Insert the driver disc into the drive.
2. Restart the computer and while it turns on, press “F6” on the keyboard.

Method 3. If the two methods described above did not bring the desired result, then you will have to integrate SATA drivers into the OS distribution. The first step is to integrate individual SATA drivers or, in some cases, entire packages. You can also integrate drivers together with updates.

You can find out exactly what updates and drivers are required on the website of the manufacturer of your motherboard installed on your computer. To find out what kind of motherboard you have, you can right-click on the “My Computer” shortcut and through the drop-down menu go to “Properties”, where this data is indicated. You can also look at this information in the documents that were given to you when you purchased the computer.
It is worth saying that the situation when the system does not see the hard drive is faced big number users, especially when re Windows installation. If you also encounter this problem, then it is not necessary to contact a service center or specialists to solve it. You can handle it quite well on your own.

First of all, if the hard drive is not detected when reinstalling the operating system, you need to resort to the methods that were described earlier (integrating motherboard drivers and turning off the AHCI parameter via BIOS system). If these actions did not give the desired result, then you will need to check whether the connection is made correctly on your hard drive. Figure 5 shows an example of a correct connection.

Figure 5 - Connecting a hard drive

The main thing you should learn for yourself is that the device thanks to which the hard drive is connected and attached to motherboard computer has two main connectors. One of them is black, the second is blue (cyan). Moreover this characteristic is the same regardless of what version of the Windows operating system you have. We are interested in the blue connector, which is responsible for work hard disk and floppy drive (device for external reading). It is better to connect the hard drive to the blue connector, because, as practice has shown, the black connector is quite unstable.

If, after checking the connection, the hard drive is still not detected or a message is displayed stating that the HDD device is not working correctly, then most likely it is all due to software errors.

If none of the methods described above helped, you will have to contact qualified specialists.

Definition problems hard drive may arise in different situations: when installing Windows XP, 7, 8 or 10, connecting a second or external hard drive. Depending on the conditions under which the error occurred, the methods for eliminating it differ significantly.

Search for disk during installation

If during installation Windows does not see the hard drive, then the cause of this error is the lack of necessary drivers. The crash usually appears on laptops and ultrabooks with SSDs. The Windows installation program does not contain the necessary software, so in order to install XP, “seven”, “eight” or Windows 10, you must first install the drivers.

Check your computer's specifications. You need to find out which processor is used - Intel, AMD. For Intel computers You need to download the Intel® Rapid Storage Technology driver. If it's worth AMD processor, then look for what you need software by request “SATA/RAID driver + motherboard model”.

  1. Download and unpack the data archive. Place it on the Windows installation flash drive. If you are installing XP from a disk, then transfer the driver to the USB flash drive anyway; it needs to be connected together with installation disk before turning on the computer.
  2. Start installing Windows 10, 8, 7, XP. When you reach the stage of selecting a section, click on the “Download” link.
  3. Specify the path to the downloaded driver on the flash drive.

After adding the drivers, you will see the available hard drive partitions and can install them on Windows computer XP, 7, 8, 10.

External drive detection

If Windows 7 does not see a hard drive that is connected via USB as an external drive, then the first thing you should do is make sure that the correct letter is assigned to the drive.

  1. Open Control Panel, set the View option to Large Icons. Go to the "Administration" section.
  2. Launch the Computer Management tool.
  3. In the menu on the left, find the “Storage Devices” section and launch the “Disk Management” tool.

On Windows 8 and 10, the procedure is completely identical; on XP there are some differences: in particular, the “Administration” section opens through the “Programs” menu in Start. In any case, in the Disk Management window you should see all the drives connected to the computer: the main, external, second internal.

If the external hard drive is correctly detected by the system, right-click on it and select “Change letter”. Assign a letter that is not already used in the system: for example, X or M.

If the external hard drive is new and you haven’t written anything to it yet, then try formatting it so that the hard drive can be recognized in the system. Formatting will delete all data, so you need to be sure that there is nothing important on the media. Unformatted external storage will have the signature “Not distributed”.

  1. Right-click on the disk and click “Create Simple Volume.”
  2. Enter the space size of the new volume. If you want the external drive to consist of one partition, then enter maximum size, that is, the entire volume of the carrier.
  3. Assign a letter and click Next. Format the volume to file system NTFS. Leave the remaining parameters unchanged.

After formatting is complete, the external drive should be correctly detected by the system and appear in “Computer”. These steps work the same on all versions of Windows, from XP to Windows 10. If changing the letter and formatting does not solve the problem, then make sure that USB port works without errors - look in the device manager for controller drivers. Make sure that the cable used for connection external drive, correct. If previously the hard drive was detected without problems, but now it is not detected by the system, then check it with an antivirus.

Problems with the second disk

If Windows 7 does not see the hard drive connected to system unit as a second drive, you first need to make sure that this drive is detected in the Disk Management utility.

  1. Press Win+R and enter “diskmgmt.msc” to open the Mounted Drive Management Tool. The team is relevant for everyone Windows versions, from XP to 10.
  2. Find the second drive among the connected drives. Look at what status it has - depending on this, the methods for correcting the error will differ.

If there are no error messages, try first simply changing the letter to a value that is not yet used on the system. As for errors, the disk may not be initialized, not distributed, or simply have a file RAW system. How to fix these problems.