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Windows does not see the hard drive. Find drivers for your hard drive

This article explains in detail what to do if Windows 7 does not see HDD... You will also learn how to deal with errors and problems that arise when reinstalling operating system Windows.

This is information that will be useful to everyone, because in our time Personal Computer is in almost any home. Moreover, most often it is Windows that is used as the operating system. Simply put, if you have problems with the operating system while working on your computer, then this article will help you. Let's analyze the situation when the system does not see the hard drive. Initially, you need to perform a couple of simple steps:

Find the shortcut "My Computer" on the desktop, move the mouse pointer over it and right-click. A menu will be displayed in which you need to click on the "Control" line (Figure 1).

Figure 1 - Context menu

In the "Computer Management" window that opens, click on the "Disk Management" line from the "Storage Devices" category (Figure 2).

Figure 2 - Computer Management

Figure 3 - Change the drive letter

Now it remains to change the letters of the disk title so that the OS can find it. Also, those who installed Windows 7 instead of Windows XP can move the settings of the programs installed on the computer and the My Documents folder to the Windows system directory, which will allow using the new OS. Hard drive not detected during Windows reinstallation

Quite often during reinstallation Windows users face the problem that the hard drive is not detected. There are several ways to fix this problem.

Method 1. The most famous method is to disable AHCI in the operating system through the BIOS (Basic Input Output System). Immediately after you do this, the computer will be able to detect the hard drive. Now we will describe in more detail how to do this:
1. Restart your computer. Press "F2" or "Delete" on the keyboard from the moment it starts to turn on. Thus, you will enter the BIOS settings.
2. Select the operating system settings in the menu and turn off AHCI mode as shown in (Figure 4).

Figure 4 - Disable AHCI

Method 2. It may well be that the computer does not see the hard drive due to problems with motherboard(when reinstalling any version of Windows). In this case, you need to download the driver for the motherboard of your computer on the Internet and write it to disk. Then, using this disk, add the driver to the root directory of the operating system.

This is done as follows:
1. Insert the driver disc into the drive.
2. Restart your computer and while it turns on, press "F6" on the keyboard.

Method 3. If the above two methods did not bring the desired result, then you will have to integrate SATA drivers into the OS distribution. First, you need to integrate individual SATA drivers or, in some cases, entire packages. You can also integrate drivers along with updates.

You can find out exactly what updates and drivers are required on the website of the manufacturer of your motherboard installed on your computer. To find out what kind of motherboard you have, you can right-click on the shortcut "My Computer" and through the drop-down menu go to "Properties", where these data are indicated. You can also look at this information in the documents that were given to you when buying a computer.
It should be said that a situation where the system does not see the hard drive is faced by a large number of users, especially when reinstalling Windows... If you also encounter this problem, then it is not necessary to contact the service center or specialists to solve it. You can do it yourself.

First of all, if the hard disk is not detected when reinstalling the operating system, you must resort to the methods that were described earlier (integrating motherboard drivers and shutting down parameter AHCI across BIOS system). If these actions did not give the desired result, then you will need to check whether the connection on your hard drive is correct. Figure 5 shows an example of a correct connection.

Figure 5 - Connecting the hard drive

The main thing that you should learn for yourself is that the device, thanks to which the hard drive is connected and attached to motherboard computer has two main connectors. One of them is black, the second is blue (blue). And given characteristic is such regardless of what version of the operating system you have Windows systems... We are interested in the blue connector, which is responsible for the work hard disk and a disk drive (device for external reading). It is better to connect the hard drive to the blue connector, because, as practice has shown, the black connector is rather unstable.

If, after performing the connection check, the hard disk is still not detected or a message is displayed that the HDD device is not working correctly, then most likely the whole thing is in software errors.

If none of the above methods helped, you will have to contact qualified specialists.

Recently I received a comment in which a user had a problem installing Windows on a PC, it turns out that the installer does not see the hard drive, so it is not clear where to install the system. Below the installer describes the cause of the error, which tells us that there is no disk media driver and needs to be loaded.

The problem is common and I want to write a small instruction to help people solve it. Let's figure it out.

Find drivers for your hard drive

Modern computers, or rather laptops, having Intel processor, then on their website you can find required drivers... To make it easier, you can enter the following into any search engine: "Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) Driver". In the results, you can search for the required driver for any operating system.

If you have an AMD processor in your laptop, you can search for drivers by the following query: "SATA / RAID driver (or laptop)".

You can find drivers on the Internet if you just enter the model of your laptop or motherboard computer.

Installing the driver if Windows does not see the hard drive during installation

The next thing is the most interesting. After you have downloaded the driver, you need to drop it onto, in our case, the USB flash drive from which you are going to install Windows. Even if you are using a bootable DVD, you should still put the driver on a flash drive and then insert it into your computer. Placing the driver on disk will prevent you from installing it properly.

Start booting from a flash drive or disk until the installer appears. Then press the button.

A window will appear where you need to specify the path to the driver, this is our flash drive, click OK. Driver installation will begin, and then you should see your disks and partitions, if, of course, everything went well.

On a note, I want to say that if you are installing Windows on your computer for the first time, and after installing the drivers, 3 or more partitions appeared in the installer, then you do not need to delete them, format them and do other actions with them. It is possible to carry out manipulations only with the most voluminous section. The fact is that the rest of the sections are important, since they store information on that will help.

If you yourself cannot turn everything that I have written here, then contact the specialists and they will be able to fix everything for you for a fee.

The last option is to use a different Windows assembly. Perhaps due to the curvature of your assembly, the installer cannot see the disks, try it.

On this, I think we can end, I hope this guide will help you in solving the problem with installing Windows.

Problems with identifying the hard drive can arise in different situations: when installing Windows XP, 7, 8 or 10, connecting a second or external hard drive... Depending on the conditions for the appearance of the error, the methods for its elimination differ significantly.

Searching for a disc during installation

If during the installation Windows does not see the hard drive, then the cause of this error is the absence of required drivers... The crash usually appears on laptops and ultrabooks with SSDs. The Windows installation program does not have the necessary software, so to install XP, 7, 8 or Windows 10, you must first install the drivers.

Check your computer's spec. You need to find out which processor is used - Intel, AMD. For Intel computers, you need to download the Intel® Rapid Storage Technology driver. If worth AMD processor then look for what you need software on request "SATA / RAID driver + motherboard model".

Download and unpack the data archive. Drop it onto the Windows installation USB stick. If you install XP from a disk, you will still transfer the driver to a USB flash drive; it must be connected together with installation disc before turning on the computer.
Get started Windows installation 10, 8, 7, XP. When you reach the stage of choosing a section, click on the "Download" link.
Specify the path to the downloaded driver on the flash drive.

After adding the drivers, you will see the available sections of the hard drive and you can install on Windows computer XP, 7, 8, 10.

External storage detection

If Windows 7 does not see a hard drive that is connected via USB as an external media, then the first step is to make sure that the drive is assigned the correct drive letter.

Open Control Panel, set "Large Icons" for "View". Go to the "Administration" section.
Start the Computer Management tool.
In the menu on the left, find the "Storage" section and launch the "Disk Management" tool.

On Windows 8 and 10, the procedure is completely identical, on XP there are some differences: in particular, the "Administrative Tools" section is opened through the "Programs" menu in Start. In any case, in the "Disk Management" window you should see all the drives connected to the computer: main, external, second internal.

If the external hard drive was correctly detected by the system, right-click on it and select "Change letter". Assign a letter that is not yet used on the system: for example, X or M.

If the external hard drive is new, you haven't recorded anything on it yet, then try to format it so that the hard drive can be detected in the system. All data will be erased during formatting, so you need to be sure that there is nothing important on the medium. Unformatted external storage will have the signature "Not Distributed".

Right click on the disk, click Create Simple Volume.
Enter the size of the space for the new volume. If you want the external drive to consist of one partition, then enter maximum size, that is, the entire volume of the carrier.
Assign a letter and click Next. Format the volume to file system NTFS. Leave the rest of the parameters unchanged.

After formatting is complete, the external drive should be correctly detected by the system and displayed in the "Computer". These steps are the same on all versions of Windows, from XP to Windows 10. If changing the letter and formatting does not solve the problem, then make sure USB port works without errors - look in the device manager for the controller drivers. Make sure that the cable used for the connection external drive, serviceable. If earlier hard was detected without problems, but now it is not detected by the system, then check it with an antivirus.

Problems with the second drive

If Windows 7 does not see the hard drive connected to system unit as a second drive, you first need to make sure that this drive is detected in the Disk Management utility.

Press Win + R and enter "diskmgmt.msc" to open the Mounted Drives Management Tool. The command is relevant for all versions of Windows, from XP to 10.
Find the second drive among the connected drives. Look what status it has - depending on this, the methods for correcting the error will differ.