Secondary drive not visible after a fresh install of Windows 8.

Question

So tonight I went from Vista (I know) to Windows 8. My primary drive is a Samsung SSD and my secondary drive is a Western Digital 500gb platter drive. When I go to "My Computer", only the SSD drive (C:) is available. If I go to "Disk Management", the drive is there and says:

Healthy (System, Active, Primary Partition)

Additional Info:

1. It happens to be disk zero, while my drive C: is disk 1.
2. I just noticed that in my list of "Volumes" my boot disk has a drive letter of C: but my second drive (that is not showing) has no drive letter associated with it. When I went to "Change Drive Letter and Paths" I could pick any drive letter except C (expected) or D. What does that mean?

Answer 1

D: is likely your CD rom drive. For some reason the drive got unmounted - just set a drive letter, run chkdisk, and see if there's any errors - that should rule out an error related unmount. I'd also look at event viewer - under system, to see if there's any disk related errors there. If you find any, update your question with that info. I'd also try running the drive utilities from your disk drive maker, or a suitable disk health check tool - I use gsmartcontrol

Its probably just a random glitch.

I'd note though, if the drive keeps vanishing after being mounted, despite the 'healthy' tag, there's a chance the drive's on its last legs. I'd suggest a backup if you end up having to reset the drive letter more than once.