Help Needed Hard drive vanished and will not install OS

[Gamepro105]

Hello every one!

This will sound stupid because it sounds stupid to me but i'm normally able to fix these problems with a bit of google but apparently not with this

Tonight I decided i wanted to put windows 8 on my secondary hard drive its only 80gb hdd but it should have been a simple as put the usb in boot it chose the disk and install windows 8 right?

well not in this case i've been struggling for a while with this and i've manege to some how make some other option about windows recovery appear on my boot menu where i choose what OS to click on and the recovery thing just sends my through a windows 8 logo and then back into the operating system choosing screen so i tried it again and i went to install it i believe its a file in the C drive that i can sort out but the main problem is this;

The error message i got was "windows cannot be installed to this disk this computer's hardware may not support booting this disk ensure the disk's controller is enabled in the computer's bios menu" so it use to work on my computer as a secondary hard drive i tried to install windows 8 to it and got that error so i looked in my bios and the drive appears WD-80GB and my 1TB drive also appears but then now when i try and look in windows the drive dose not appear any more, and ive looked in the advanced storage it doesn't appear in there if i try and look up the disk when trying to install windows 8 it now only shows my 1TB drive my question is;

How do i get the drive back?
how do i install windows 8 and get rid of that message?


Thank you for any help I will try and respond to any questions you may want to ask as quickly as possible !

 

[Feronix]

Two things come to mind to me:

Can you boot into your old (win7?) install?
If yes, do that, click start, type disk management, click "Create and format hard disk partitions". There you should be able to see your 80GB drive, format it and assign a drive letter. It should then show up in Explorer.

Have you tried going into your bios and setting the Sata mode to IDE? AHCI is usually better, but I once did a Win8 install on an MSI board and it wouldn't get into the installer unless I set the Sata mode to IDE. You can change it back to AHCI after the install.

 

[Gamepro105]

Two things come to mind to me:

Can you boot into your old (win7?) install?
If yes, do that, click start, type disk management, click "Create and format hard disk partitions". There you should be able to see your 80GB drive, format it and assign a drive letter. It should then show up in Explorer.

Have you tried going into your bios and setting the Sata mode to IDE? AHCI is usually better, but I once did a Win8 install on an MSI board and it wouldn't get into the installer unless I set the Sata mode to IDE. You can change it back to AHCI after the install.

When i did that it didn't show up and i was really confused until i moved the sata ports around and then my 1TB drive didn't work i may have messed up a bios setting so i posted in the bios section about storage because it seems to be another topic i know little about

After a few hours of messing around i moved the sata cables to the black ports on the mother board but i need to go and get my as rock Manuel out to find out exactly what they are for (it is currently at my other house) but i used them to boot into it and both drives are working but i wanted to know more about AHCI and IDE so ill have to read that part of the mobo Manuel so its currently working i just don't understand why or how :L

EDIT: i found out i plugged them into the sata 2 ports and it worked but not in the sata 3 ports is there some sort of bios thing ive messed up?

 

[yassarikhan786]

In the advanced settings of your motherboards BIOS, there may be an option for enabling/disabling SATA ports. I'm just guessing as I've never seen ASRock's BIOS.

Have you flashed the BIOS recently? If you haven't, you should try flashing the BIOS to the latest version (if there is one)

 

[Gamepro105]

In the advanced settings of your motherboards BIOS, there may be an option for enabling/disabling SATA ports. I'm just guessing as I've never seen ASRock's BIOS.

Have you flashed the BIOS recently? If you haven't, you should try flashing the BIOS to the latest version (if there is one)

they are enabled i will post a picture of my bios settings tomorow
My bios is currently at its latest version and it was working fine,

 

[Wraith]

As feronix has stated it sounds like it's not formatted correctly with a valid partition I've had dell laptops do this it's a right ball ache.

 

[Feronix]

What if you boot into a Windows 7 install disc/usb and click custom install. Do the drives show up and can you partition them?

Since your motherboard is a Gen3 version, I'm assuming it has the B3 stepping thing?

 

[Gamepro105]

What if you boot into a Windows 7 install disc/usb and click custom install. Do the drives show up and can you partition them?

Since your motherboard is a Gen3 version, I'm assuming it has the B3 stepping thing?

it might be when i get home form college i will post a picture of my bios and see if any one can make sence of it

As feronix has stated it sounds like it's not formatted correctly with a valid partition I've had dell laptops do this it's a right ball ache.

I maneged to partition, format it and finaly get it all to work, the problem i now have is i have to use sata 2 insted of the sata 3 for some random reason

 

[Feronix]

Do you have this option available in your UEFI bios?

Go to 'Advanced', then Storage Configuration,
-"Asmedia SATA3 Mode" should be IDE (had that right)
-Changed "Asmedia SATA3 Bootable" to YES

 

[Gamepro105]

this is my bios screen? i changed it to Asmedia bootable but it seems to go to a funny black screen with text that says no drives found before it boots

 

[Feronix]

-Change "Asmedia SATA3 Bootable" to YES

You got the black screen after setting this?
Remember that you probably do have to plug your drive into the physical Sata3 port for this to work.

Have you tried updating all your drivers via the ASRock website? Seems like a long shot but I read that it did help for someone.

 

[Gamepro105]

You got the black screen after setting this?
Remember that you probably do have to plug your drive into the physical Sata3 port for this to work.

Have you tried updating all your drivers via the ASRock website? Seems like a long shot but I read that it did help for someone.

i plugged the drives back in and it boots just not the same as it usto?

i will try and update all the drivers as soon as i can