Internal Hard Drives showing up in Device Manager but not in Disk Management

Question

I have 3 internal hard drives installed. Over the past few days I've installed a couple of OS' on them and I have finally decided on windows server. The issue is that now 2 of the 3 hard drives are not showing up.

I have tried checking disk management to create a volume on them. I have also tried opening DISKPART and assigning them a letter, but in both scenarios the drives don't appear. The only place I can get them to be recognized by windows is in the device manager under disk drives. One thing I noticed that is odd is when I click on populate under the volumes tab inside the properties of the two drives they throw an error saying "Volume information for this disk cannot be found".

Computer Info: OS: Windows Server 2016 CPU: AMD Ryzen 2700x MOBO: Asus X470 PRO-Prime HDD's: 3x 4TB Seagate Ironwolf

Answer 1

I have the same issue (same symptoms i.e. device management sees the drive and its controller but disk management cannot see it nor can diskpart.) although my problem arises from a seagate BUP suddenly refusing to recognize on windows after plugging into mac. As I don't see references to a similar question being asked, I see the need for this question to be answered.

External USB drives are sort of a different area. Often with problem drives, the drive is detected as a mass storage device because the enclosure tells Windows it is a mass storage device, this however tells nothing about the state of the drive inside the enclosure.

Does it spin?

First diagnostic step could be: Use your ears and listen if you can actually hear the drive spin up when you connect it.

If it doesn't, you'd need to separate the drive and the enclosure and see if the drive powers up either connected using it's native interface (SATA port for example) or by using a different SATA > USB adapter. Note that for 3.5" drives you'd need one with an external power adapter.

It doesn't spin

Again the cause can be the enclosure (not providing power to the drive) or the drive itself for example due to a blown TVS diode. So again separating the drive and enclosure should allow you to pinpoint this.

A blown TVS diode can be 'fixed' often by simply removing the diode.

However the drive now runs without protection so it should be imaged/cloned ASAP and then no longer be used. For more information: http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/HDD/TVS_diode_FAQ.html

It spins

If you can get the drive to spin up using whatever method there should be no reason for Disk Management to not display the physical drive regardless what's on it. Disk Management may present prompts, prompting you to do something, it may display RAW partitions but it should be able to show the physical drive.

To rule out any PC specific issues, hook drive up to another PC.

If the drive spins, but does not ID at all, the drive's controller is the first suspect.

It spins

Try the drive with Linux. Apart from ruling out causes using different hardware, a different OS might make a difference. For example if Linux detects the drive, then you know it's not a drive issue, but possibly a Windows issue.

It does not take much for Windows to drop a USB drive, while Linux may still work with it

It spins, is detected, but with wrong capacity

This would tell us the controller is okay, but the firmware (which it needs to read from the system area on the platters themselves) is corrupt.

Long story short

Long story short, by using different hardware combinations you try to see if it's PC related. Use different operating systems to determine if the issue is OS related. By separating the drive from the enclosure you try determining if it's related to the drive itself or the enclosure.

Answer 2

There is often a lot of confusion around what is seen in the BIOS, and what is seen in e.g. Windows. It is only necessary for the BIOS to recognize drives you intend to boot. Other drives can be left in the BIOS or left out/removed. If you leave other drives in the BIOS make sure that the order of the drives is setup appropriately (generally meaning you should put your first/second/third drives to align with your intended C: D: E: volumes). Placing the wrong drives in the wrong order in the BIOS commonly breaks boot loaders, mirrored plexes, and more unusual configurations.

For a drive to be seen in Device Manager, Windows has talked to the hardware controller. For a drive to be seen in Disk Management is must be recognizable and not reserved by another disk manager. Commonly this happens with cluster or storage spaces disks. Once storage spaces claims the disk, it will no longer appear in Disk Management. Unrecognized/corrupted partitioning, file systems, etc. can also hide an otherwise perfectly good disk.

I'm going to choose not to believe you about diskpart, in part because I can't think of a good reason for Device Manager to see a disk and diskpart not to. Also in part because you mention assigning drive letters to drives, which skips several steps - namely picking MBR vs GPT, partitioning, and formatting.

Start a command line as an Administrator (Runas Administrator). Start diskpart.

list disk
select disk <0>
detail disk
clean all

Where <0> is one of your unrecognized disks. Note: This is destructive to all data on the disk. No data will be recoverable without fairly extensive recovery efforts. Do not accidentally wipe your OS disk unless you want your entire system to be wiped clean.

After the clean all command and a reboot the disk should show up in Disk Management. You may need to mark it online. You will need to initialize it, pick MBR or GPT, create a partition, format the partition, and assign a mount point/drive letter to.

Answer 3

Do you see the drives in Linux? If so, try repartitioning+formatting to a single partition with FAT32 (after deleting anything already there).

I use fdisk in Ubuntu (assume drive is /dev/sdb):

sudo fdisk /dev/sdb
sudo mkfs.vfat -F32 /dev/sdb1

Remount in Windows. If it still does not work. Open and mount drive in Linux again, then wipe it and either repartion+format first in Linux and try in Windows again or just try in Windows directly after wiping.

To wipe use:

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=4096 status=progress

I like dc3dd better, but it may not be available by default.

Answer 4

I have the same issue (same symptoms i.e. device management sees the drive and its controller but disk management cannot see it nor can diskpart.) although my problem arises from a seagate BUP suddenly refusing to recognize on windows after plugging into mac. As I don't see references to a similar question being asked, I see the need for this question to be answered.

I suggest for this case to open the drive in your MacOS. Then repartition+format to FAT32.

In your MacOS:

1. Choose “Application”. Then open “Utilities”.

2. Click “Disk Utilities”.

3. Select your drive from Disk Utilities

4. Click “Erase” from the toolbar

5. In the "Erase" prompt window use:

   “Format”: “MS-DOS FAT”

   "Scheme": "Master Boot Record"

6. Click Erase

Then try again in Windows