I'm building a new Windows 7 machine and trying to add an old NTFS SATA disk as a secondary drive to the system, but having problems.
The system is a new Core i3 on a Z68 motherboard, the OS is Windows 7 Home Premium installed on a OCZ Agility 3 SSD and the hard drive is a Samsung HD501LJ. I installed Windows on the SSD without the HD installed.
After installing the hard drive, I boot windows and go to Disk Management and it says
You must initialize a disk before Logical Disk Manager can access it.
In addition, the Disk Management console is showing the size of the drive as 931.52GB, rather than the 465.76GB that the bios and other machines, show.
Since I initially put it on a SATA III port, I tried moving it to a SATA II port, but that made no difference. I then tried putting it into an external SATA enclosure, and while it then showed the correct size and didn't ask me to initialise the disk, it didn't allow me to access the drive either. It correctly showed that it was Basic disk and contained a Healthy, Active, Primary Partition, but it didn't show the volume name, allow me to set a drive letter or acknowledge that it was an NTFS volume.
The hard drive works fine on my Vista and XP systems. Ideas appreciated.
Best Answer
Try booting from a Linux Live CD such as Ubuntu
If Linux sees the HDD properly, then the problem is likely a missing Windows driver.
On the other hand, if Linux acts similar to Windows with regards to this HDD, then it is likely a hardware issue.