HDX Dual Hard Drive problem

I have an HDX with 500 GB of storage, divided in two 250 GB hard drives. The problem is that the computer only detects one of these hard drives. I have Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit. The "Computer" window shows two hard disk drives, one is the OS one (C of 219 GB and the other is called HP_RECOVERY (D of 13.6 GB. I think this last one may be a partition of something.
Does anyone know what I need to do to make the second hard drive appear in the Computer windows?

 

Have you looked in the BIOS or gone to Start>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Disk management to see if there are actually two hard drives? If there is only one physical hard drive listed in Disk Management or on the main page of BIOS, then either the hard drive is dead, HP didn't install it or the connector on the motherboard is broken. If it is in both, make sure that the 2nd physical drive is formatted. It will not show up in My computer if it is not formatted with the NTFS or any other Windows file system.

-J.B.

 

Thanks for the reply Jstn7477. I accessed the Disk Management and upon clicking on it, it showed a small windows that said this:
You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it.
Then theres a box with a list, it contains only one selected item named Disk 1.
After that there are two options:
Use the following partition style for the selected disks:
MBR (Master boot record)
GPT (GUID Partition Table)
Note: The GPT partitions style is not recognized by all previous versions of Windows. It is recommended for disks larger than 2 TB, or discs used on Itanium based computers.

So, I guess I should initialize Disk 1 so that it can be recognized. I suppose the best options would be Master Boot Record.
Or am I wrong? Please, any help would be appreciated.

 

It should contain Disk 0 and Disk 1.

Disk 0 (your drive C: & boot drive) should read healthy.

If you see disk 0 and disk 1, go ahead and choose MBR for disk 1.

If not, open up the bottom and seat the drives.

Strange that the 2nd drive did not come formatted.

 

Yeah 2.0, it lists Disk 0 as my primary drive and it is healthy.
So I guess I'll have to format Disk 1. It is weird, like you said, that it didn't come formatted out of the box.
Thanks for the help.

 

No problem.

 

Hi there i'm having a similar problem. I have a hp dv7-1055 with dual 250 gig sata hdd's. They both appeared fine until recently and now the secondary disk drive is not recognised at all in computer management or disk management but i can do a full scan in the bios and it will come back with no problems. However i kno the drive itself is fine because i took it out and connected it to my desktop to back up the data.
This happened to me before and was only fixed by doing a full system format and install.
Obviously this is the second time its done it in a week and i dont want to keep reformatting and installing everything.

I'm running vista home premium if that helps.

I appreciate any suggestions or help given.

Kind regards,
xpa12

 

What file system did you format the drive on? FAT32 or NTFS

Also are you sure its connected properly using the caddy?