Locating Second Hard Drive

I purchased a M17x and I had a solid state 232 GB HD installed and I cannot locate my internal (500 GB)hd that came with the computer. Is there a way to locate this drive?

 

go into diskpart and assign a drive letter for your secondary drive. make sure the second drive is visible in the bios first.

 

Hmm, I am still having diffculty with the locating the drive. I have an intel 510series 250 gb drive and when I acess their Intel Rapid Storage Technology it has my second disk drive as a recovery drive attached to the ssd. I would like for the second hardrive to be indepedent from my ssd. How can i make this possible?

 

The recovery drive is supposed to be a small partition (about 10GB) separated from your OS drive. So C:\ for your OS; D:\ the recovery one and both C:\ & D:\ uses the storage space from your primary drive and THEN starting from E:\ is your secondary hard drive. Do you have that displayed in my computer? Is your secondary drive formatted? and in my case (also an intel 510 120gb but with a secondary ssd) I just uninstalled rapid storage technology because it has been constantly reporting nonexistent issues and then had conflict with other drivers after I reinstalled windows

 

The strangest thing is the only drive on my computer is C. Driver d does not even exist on my computer. Both hardrives are accounted for in C but I am unable to access the second hard drvie because it is a recovery drive (I can't even format it) . I am running RAID in my bios if that helps any.

 

Go to Control panel -> Administrative tools -> computer management -> storage -> disk management. There you should see all the hard disks connected to the computer even if they are not showing in my computer. And then this which I copy and pasted from another source:

your second disk will show, but not active(initialized)

need to make active by right clicking on window that represents then drive
then make active partition(drive)
select to create partition (if applicable)
select format (if applicable)

wait and drive will change status to "healthy" at top windows and your drive/data will now be accessible and visible in 'My Computer'

Basically that's how i installed my second ssd so it should work.

 

Okay, I am at the page and I see the hardrive, but it is under drive C. Are you saying that the drive will be seperate from drive C or will it be always under drive C. If it is supposed to be under drive C then do i need to format drive C to where I can create new drives myself.

 

It should be separate and definitely not under your C. The one under the C drive seems to be the recovery drive. The secondary hard drive should be displayed here as an entirely independent drive. It would be best if you could post a screenshot because right now it's sounding a bit confusing. If your second drive is not showing up in disk management it might be because it's not properly (physically) connected. Or there could be problem that would require quite a bit of explaining...

You should also try google "hard drive not showing in disk management" and see if you can find someone having the exact same problem

 

While editing the disk drive I ran into an error when I rebooted my system. It says unable to load boot manager. Is it possible to get around this. I just seem to be having a bad day with ths computer.

Edit: Well ran into another error which seems to be more serious. I may have to do reinstall of windows 7. The reason why Iam having this problem is because I had this computer shipped to me pre-installed with all the hardware. I would have did a fresh install a long time ago to avoid these issues but I am was concerned with alienware respawn not being on my computer when I got it. I am in the process of performing a re-boot due to my stupidity I will give an update when I am done.

 

Well sorry to hear about that. Looks like I was luckier that I didn't encounter any problem when installing the new drives. (despite the stock HDD that had mechanically failed that is)

Just one more question: did you 'cloned' your OS from your stock hard drive to the ssd or did you do a fresh install on it? If you simply transferred everything that might be the source of the problem. At this point a reinstall seems the best way to get rid of any chance of long-term problems. If you're using one SSD and one HDD then I would suggest switch from RAID to AHCI before the reinstall.

Good luck with your reinstall then

 

That is exactly what i did I switched to ACHI mode before reinstalling my stuff. Also this Alienware was sent to me pre-installed with hardware amd software. I am guessing the technician cloned the software because he had the BIOS in RAID and other minor issues. I am just hope I can keep the alienware look and feel of the computer.

 

You can. I too did a clean reinstall of everything and it now looks exactly the same as when its first launched. There's the alien command center, that mycolor theme, login page wallpapers and a few others things. There are a few threads here that tells you how to do it, it's not hard at all. Try look for that "how to restore the alienware look and feel" thread. But first of all good luck with your reinstall.