Arrgh - No Disks visible

[Phage]

So I have new SSD to put into the machine on the left. I format the disk, take a full system image and then start to reinstall.
But it wont. It says that there are no disks visible to install to. Mobo is set to AHCI should I change to IDE ? If so wouldnt the install be different.

[g8ina]

Mine is set to IDE, it works.

[Phage]

Weirder and weirder.
Under IDE it still can't see the drives but is happy to do a restore ?
I'll keep you posted.

[g8ina]

What brand and model SSD ?

[Phage]

It's a Samsung 830.
Old setup was booting from M4 - C:, Vertex2 as B; HDD as E.
I wanted to make it
830=C (boot)
m4=B (other apps and steam)

The BIOS doesn't show the 830 as a boot option, infact it doesn't appear at all. W7 OTOH sees it just fine in Disk Manager and is happy for it to be the B: drive.
But it's not what I wanted....Grrrrrr

[Scainer]

If your using Ghost, you need to initialise the disk within disk management, create the mbr, and the drive needs to be unallocated space.

Then in Ghost you need to set it to an active boot drive, copy the mbr, primary partition, and c: as the drive letter, selecting the unallocated space as the destination.

In windows 7 you may have a system partition. Do this first without a drive letter, and then just repeat with the c: partition just assigning the drive letter. i.e. don't reselect the other options.


Once it was done I installed only the new SSD to begin with to avoid any conflicts, before adding other drives.

[Phage]

Update: Gawd what hard work that was ! Without Ghost or similar.

Discovered I couldn't do a one-shot of recovery from backup because of the changed structure of my disks. The Restore would litter my system image across the new state with no rhyme or reason. The 830 wouldn't show in the BIOS, but did in W7. The solution was as follows;

1) Flash MoBo to latest version. 830 appears
2) Use the 'Clean' command in Diskpart to format the 830. It is now installable-to, where it wasn't before.
3) Unplug all other devices and install W7 from DVD to the 830
4) Use disk manager to format and partition the other SSD and HDD
5) Re-install apps from download or disc, not from backup. It gets all fidgety about the new disk layouts.
6) Re-install music, pictures and document folders.
7) Install Steam client replace apps folder from backup.
8) Moan about it on forums...