BIOS AND Vista Not Seeing 2nd Hard Drive

[ejames]

I have upgraded from Windows XP Service Pack 3 to Vista on a Toshiba Qosmio
G35-AVA600 which has two 80GB SATA hard drives. In Windows XP the drive was
seen as one 180GB hard drive. No problem.

After I installed Vista the second drive is not showing and I can't format
it from disk management services because it is not shown.

The wierd thing is that I am not missing any files, but perhaps I had not
used any space on the second hard drive, therefore I wouldn't be missing any
files.

Also, after installing Vista I checked the BIOS and it does not see my
second hard drive (it lists second hard drive and says "None"), nor does My
Computer but it is there as I have made no hardware changes. All I did was
upgrade from Windows XP Service Pack 3 to installing Windows Vista. I have
the latest RAID drivers from Toshiba which was updated after I installed
Vista. The latest BIOS was installed from Toshiba website BEFORE I upgraded
and it WAS listed in the BIOS.

I've read the many threads on second ATA hard drives but no one mentions
that their BIOS does not recognize the drive as well as Vista.

How do I fix this problem?? Any help at all would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks!

 

[DL]

Winxp showed one drive because you had a stripe array
Vista has no baring on the bios, so if its not there now it was unlikely to
have been there before - You are refering to motherboard bios BTW?

What size does vist show for C?

 

[ejames]

Yes, I am referring to the motherboard BIOS. In Windows XP it showed 180GB.

In Vista it shows 69.8 GB. There is about 10MB or so allocated to system
files.

 

[DL]

Review your mobo manual, in particular the settings for using sata drives
not in a raid.
You can usually set the Bios to Defaults, as in default mode raid settings
are generally not enabled.

 

[ejames]

I found a real simple solution to this problem.  Since neither my BIOS nor "My Computer" were seeing the second hard drive, I figured that maybe the hard drive is not completely plugged into the computer especially since the BIOS was not seeing it either and the BIOS loads before Windows.So, I unplugged it and reseated it and, low and behold, it appeared.  It must have been jiggled a bit out of socket.Thanks to all who have given me suggestions on what to try.Elizabeth


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