[Windows 7] Install cannot see drive

By kinetix63
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Grand Master

kinetix63 Veteran

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Hi Guys,

Need some help as my jet-lag riddled brain cannot figure this out.

One of my PC's seems to have had a bit of a time of it during moving house. One of 2 hard drives has failed, previously in a striped RAID configuration. The other drive appears okay, no SMART errors, and detected by the BIOS. I've removed the defective drive, disabled RAID, and attempting to install Windows 7 just on that one drive.

The BIOS can see the drive plugged in to SATA port 3 just fine, however the Windows 7 installer refuses to detect the drive at all. Any thoughts on why this might be?

This is an older machine, running on an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard, which is an nForce 4 chipset.

Can anybody point me in the right direction?

Thanks

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Grand Master

kinetix63 Veteran

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Thanks for the help so far guys - to answer some of the points:

Do you have a sata drive on the win 7 install software?

If memory serves press F6 at boot and install the driver from the motherboard CD if it doesnt

Theoretically, it shouldn't need it. The motherboard is an nForce 4 chipset which, as far as I know, is supported natively.

can you see the drive in computer management? it may just be a case of windows has not mounted the drive.

Alas, courtesy of the other drive in the RAID array failing, I can't even boot windows (it was set to Striped mode). What I'm trying to do now is disable RAID entirely and just flat install it on to this disk that used to be part of the RAID array.

Just had the same problem as my SSD card is RMAd in holland. I had to set the harddrive to active in Win 7 setup before Windows would let me install on it.

How did you do that exactly?

Thanks, but unfortunately my motherboard has no driver that needs to be loaded before install :(

Grand Master

Detection

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You need to download the RAID Controller drivers from the boards manufacturers site, extract them and put them on a FAT32 flash drive

When you reach the drive selection screen, hit the browse for drivers button and point it to the RAID Controller drivers you downloaded

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Michael Churma III

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Since you had a raid0 and lost one drive it will not boot until you rebuilt your raid array. Also all your data is gone so I hope you performed backups. Go into the onboard raid controller on post and delete your existing raid array and recreate a new one with both drives. Either raid0 or raid1, if you go raid0 again, buy a backup drive. Once this is done boot into windows 7 and it should show as one phycisal volume and simply install Windows 7. If Windows 7 does not see the volume then using a flash drive, download the motherboard raid controller drivers and extract them, Select the driver at the Windows 7 installer screen and the hard drive should appear.

And to add I have had that same motherboard and I had the SATA ports fail on it one day out of the blue. I was also running raid0 on that mobo and also disabled the raid controller to test out what was going on. The bios detected the drives but Windows 7 would not see the drives and or would sometimes lockup at the Windows 7 install screen. After flashing the firmware, resetting the bios I had no luck so I just bought a new mobo. There is no official support for nForce4 from Nvidia for Windows 7 so the drivers for the raid array are most likley included in the Windows 7 iso image.

Grand Master

Detection

Posted
Posted

Since you had a raid0 and lost one drive it will not boot until you rebuilt your raid array. Also all your data is gone so I hope you performed backups. Go into the onboard raid controller on post and delete your existing raid array and recreate a new one with both drives. Either raid0 or raid1, if you go raid0 again, buy a backup drive. Once this is done boot into windows 7 and it should show as one phycisal volume and simply install Windows 7. If Windows 7 does not see the volume then using a flash drive, download the motherboard raid controller drivers and extract them, Select the driver at the Windows 7 installer screen and the hard drive should appear.

He said he already disabled RAID and is trying to use it as a single drive

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Michael Churma III

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@Detection I noticed that

You need to download the RAID Controller drivers from the boards manufacturers site, extract them and put them on a FAT32 flash drive

When you reach the drive selection screen, hit the browse for drivers button and point it to the RAID Controller drivers you downloaded

He said already that he disabled RAID and is trying to use it as a single drive

Get over it dude, just trying to help...

Grand Master

Aergan

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Try a diskpart on the drive

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=diskpart+drive

Your raid configuration has probably left the drive in a state where Windows 7 Setup wont touch it as it's treated as a forgein disk.

Make sure that you have the drive as the bootable drive in your BIOS/EFI and that you have a disk mode that both the motherboard and the drive are happy with (e.g. AHCI/SATA Native or IDE Mode/IDE Compatability).

Grand Master

Detection

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Posted

@Detection I noticed that

He said already that he disabled RAID and is trying to use it as a single drive

Get over it dude, just trying to help...

Wow, touchy much?

If you can't hack people pointing out what has already been said in a thread, probably better read them first don't you think ?

Grand Master

kinetix63 Veteran

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Thanks guys - I appreciate the help here. We're making some progress! Turns out that Aergan was on the right track with this. I've done a diskpart and setup can at least now see the drive! However, we're now going through a whole "windows cannot be installed to this disk, the computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk" thing. I'm just trying a "clean all" in diskpart and hoping we can move forward from there.

Unfortunately, this old motherboard is an absolute pile of $* - you cannot specify what mode the disk runs on, and from what I can google it's suggesting that AHCI isn't supported anyhow, so it's running it in IDE mode. Hopefully we're getting there now. Any thoughts on the "Windows cannot be installed to this disk" message would be much appreciated though.

Really appreciate ALL of the thoughts and suggestions so far.

Grand Master

Lee G. Veteran

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Thanks guys - I appreciate the help here. We're making some progress! Turns out that Aergan was on the right track with this. I've done a diskpart and setup can at least now see the drive! However, we're now going through a whole "windows cannot be installed to this disk, the computer's hardware may not support booting to this disk" thing. I'm just trying a "clean all" in diskpart and hoping we can move forward from there.

Unfortunately, this old motherboard is an absolute pile of $* - you cannot specify what mode the disk runs on, and from what I can google it's suggesting that AHCI isn't supported anyhow, so it's running it in IDE mode. Hopefully we're getting there now. Any thoughts on the "Windows cannot be installed to this disk" message would be much appreciated though.

Really appreciate ALL of the thoughts and suggestions so far.

You might be able to install Windows to that drive anyway. The other day I was installing Windows 8 to a VHD and it gave that error, but I was able to ignore it and install Windows on it.

Grand Master

kinetix63 Veteran

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Did you try deleting and remaking the disk partition in the windows set up?

I certainly did :) It was at that point that I get this error message now.

You might be able to install Windows to that drive anyway. The other day I was installing Windows 8 to a VHD and it gave that error, but I was able to ignore it and install Windows on it.

Hmmm, it would appear that's an improvement in Windows 8 over 7 - this darned thing just will not let you continue :/

at setup do diskpart (SHIFT+F10)

then try.....

I've done that one before, which is what managed to get the drive recognised by Setup. Unfortunately, that's not getting around this "The hardware may not support booting from this disk" error. I've left a "clean all" running on it at the moment in the vague hope that might fix it up. I'll then try creating and flagging the partitions manually.

I think failing that, maybe I should attempt to install Ubuntu just to get SOME kind of O/S on the disk and booting, then attempt to re-format and install windows over the top of it.

Grand Master

kinetix63 Veteran

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Believe it or not, it's actually only a 500GB drive, which is why I'm so confused it's giving me all this trouble!

However - we finally have success :) After a thorough clean all, a large dose of patience, and a reboot later and it is now installing! Thank you everyone!

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