If your hard drive does not show up in the BIOS of the computer, it will not be visible to Windows. There are several scenarios for this type of problem and we will try to address some of these along with their resolution. Unfortunately, hard drives are a commodity and need to be treated as such. If you have a hard drive running in your computer it is only a matter of time before it fails. However, if you purchase a new drive, it should show up in the BIOS. If not, gather as much information about your PC as you can and write it down. Such as the model and manufacturer of the drive, the manufacturer of the computer or motherboard, and the BIOS manufacturer as well as the version. The latter can often be found splashed across the screen when you first boot the PC.
New Hard Drive Does Not Show Up in The BIOS
The very first thing to check are the jumpers if you have an IDE drive. An IDE cable can support two devices, one as a Primary and one as a Seconday. These are sometimes referred to as Master and Slave. The jumper pins on the back of the drive should be set to Master for the Primary and Slave for the Secondary. There is also a jumper for Cable Select which recognizes the drives based on their location on the cable. For simplicity, stick with the Master and Slave setup. If you have a SATA drive, you do not need to worry about jumpers.
If the jumpers are correct, but the new drive is still not showing up, go into the BIOS setup and make sure the drive detection is set to AUTO. If this doesn’t work, you can try going to the manufacturer’s website and get the breakdown of Sectors, Cylinders, etc and manually input the figures. But if it doesn’t auto-detect the drive, it probably will not detect it manually, either.
The next step in this case is to flash the BIOS. Check the motherboard or computer manufacturer for a newer version. Firmware updates will often correct this type of issue as well as improve the current functionality of your hardware.
Older Drive Stopped Showing Up In BIOS
If you had an existing drive and it no longer shows up in the system BIOS, the drive is probably dead. You can try changing cables and trying a different power connector, but if the drive worked and then no longer works, this likely means the drive has failed. Drives can stop working due to an electrical or mechanical problem. A mechanical problem with the hard drive usually manifests itself in grinding or squeaking noises, random crashes or data loss. Electrical problems can happen instantly, without warning.
Drive Shows Up In BIOS But Not In Windows
This is the more typical scenario. If the drive does report properly in BIOS, but not in Windows, then the drive has lost its partitioning. You can try right-clicking My Computer, select Manage and look for the Disk Management section. From here, you can partition and format the drive. If the drive had data on it that you want to try and recover, we recommend NOT trying to partition or reformat the drive, as this data can be lost forever. Instead, run file recovery software to attempt to recover the data first.
Popular Hard Drive Utilities
The following hard drive utilities are hard drive-specific. They can help you diagnose problems, copy files, and perform partitioning and formatting functions.
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
hey guys.sumtimes my computer goes to a blue screen and says theres a critical error and your computer needs to be restarted.so it restarts.than it goes to black screen says no hard drive detected.
i reboot buy powering off and it works again.
i went to bios mode to see the order of the booting.and its all in order.
i still don’t understand why it still does that.
i have acer and i have vista
Becasue it is stating “No Hard Drive Detected” I am concerned your drive might be failing. If you know the model of the drive, visit the manufacturer’s website and download their free utility to check the health of the drive.
I have Vista & XP on my hard drive one is visible at start up and the other dont.
When i open my computer i see that both systems are on the hard drive, can you help me please?
Sounds like something has happened to the boot loader. If you once got a option to choose between the two when booting up and now it only boots directly into one, then an entry must have been removed that tells Windows to ask you. I recommend you join our forums and this question there–it might take some time to sort this out.
Hi, I think I have a bit of a problem… I have an old Dell Dimension XPS with 2 hard drives. The main one, from 1998, works perfectly and almost silently. The second, however, from 2000, started making squealing sounds and frequent hollow-sounding quite high-pitched clicks. Now it isn’t detected. It’s spinning silently in the computer now, and isn’t detected. It’s a MPE3064AT made in 2000 by Fujitsu. Is it dead? Can I get any data from it?
When the drive starts making noises, this usually means immanent death. It’s a physical problem–maybe a bearing has seized or read/write head fell off. If the has absolute critical data on it, you might be able to recover the data using a professional service that specializes in doing that.
Hi there,
I have a dell inspiron 1525 who already burnt once the HDD and now it did it again. HDD. Any idea of why this is happening? there is nothing wrong with the laptop, no noises made by the HDD, it works perfectly and when i try to boot it up the HDD is not found anymore and I have to buy a new one.
It’s not unusual for laptop drives to die. If it is happening frequently, I’d be concerned, however. Could be a problem with the motherboard.