New HDD not automatically appearing on Win7 x64 startup

[Mike Fishcake]

This one's perplexing me somewhat:

Running on Win7 64bit.

Back story (skip to the "Problem" bit if you're not bothered about the background)

Started off with 3 Hard Drives in my PC:

1x 320GB SATA (C: and E:)
1x 160GB IDE (F:)
1x 80GB IDE. (G:)

The IDE drives were "leftovers" from an old system that I thought I may as well use.

I also had a 500GB USB drive for backups.

I recently bought a 1TB external drive, so took my 500GB SATA drive out of it's USB enclosure and installed it in my PC instead of the 80GB IDE. The 500GB drive showed up as G:, like the old 80GB.

Copied all my stuff across to it, shifted some stuff around from my other drives to create more space on them, then set up a new backup system to copy all the new drive structure over to my new 1TB drive.

Got me so far?

Problem:

Now, when I boot my PC, the 500GB G: drive doesn't show up, unless I go to Computer/Manage/Storage/Disk Management/More Actions/Refresh Disks. Once I've done that, it shows up as G: with all the correct files intact - I don't have to do any more configuration or anything.

Initially, I thought it was only doing it when I had an external drive plugged in, but it seemed to do it this morning with nothing extra plugged in. Am I missing something stupid?

[Champman99]

Maybe just a letter clash, try binding it to a new letter (right click in Disk management change drive letter and paths)

Thats my only guess that its trying to load it with the same letter as another drive. Not entirely sure though.

[mightymouse]

could try unplugging the other hard drives leaving just os and 500gb to see if the problem persists

[peterb]

Windows writes a disk signature to the disk when it is first used which helps it track disk type and persistence. If the drive was first mounted as a removeable device (USB) then that signature nmay still be associated with a removeable drive that for some reason is not automounting.

This fix - trickier. As others have suggested, changing the drive letter may help, or there may be some clues in the administration function. Otherwise it's getting deep and dirty in the registry.

[Mike Fishcake]

Cheers all - will have a dig around. If anyone else has any good ideas in the meantime, feel free to share it with the class

My next idea is a bit of a bodge - sticking a batch file on bootup to force re-scan of the drives or something :-/

[watercooled]

Edit: never mind, just checked and fix wouldn't work, sorry for spamming could a mod delete please.

[Mike Fishcake]

OK, it was simpler than I thought. Did a bit more googling around and found that removing and reinstalling the hard drive's device driver seems to have worked!