New drive not appearing in windows explorer

Hc wrote:
On 28/10/2015 03:03, Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 27 Oct 2015 17:05:14 -0700, "David E. Ross"

wrote:

On 10/27/2015 4:42 PM, Hc wrote:
On 27/10/2015 21:48, David E. Ross wrote:
On 10/27/2015 2:33 PM, David E. Ross wrote:
On 10/27/2015 9:12 AM, Hc wrote:
On 27/10/2015 15:16, Big Al wrote:
Hc wrote on 10/27/2015 11:11 AM:
Hi,

I have recently connected a new solid state drive to my PC. When I
booted up Windows, windows installed the drivers
successfully. The new drive is listed in the device manager,
but when
I load up My Computer there is no sign on it. Any
ideas how I resolve this?

Thanks
Look in Disk Manager. Sometimes I've seen drives come up with
no drive
letter or the same as some other drive. Either case it's not
going to
show up.
Control Panel-Admin tools- Computer Management - Disk
Management.

Thanks for the help.

Perhaps you can help me further. I am planning on using this new SSD
drive for operating system and programs to improve performance.
Windows
explorer now recognises the drive (I've called it S:\). I have
then used
EaseUS to clone my C: on to the S:. I've then rebooted and loaded
up the
BIOS at boot to boot the computer from this new S:, but it still
feels
as if I am still booting from the old slower C:. All programs
load up
from C: not S:. What should I do next? Wipe/format the old C:?


There are some routines -- both within Windows and non-Windows
applications -- that insist on running from a C-drive.

I went through the same process that you are attempting. The
first step
was to clone my C-drive (a spinner) to the new drive (D-drive, a
solid-state drive or SSD). Then my PC was shut down and opened
up. The
drives were removed and then switched as they were reinstalled.
Thus,
the C-drive became my D-drive and vice-versa. This has worked
very well.


I forgot to include the following --

After switching my drives so that the C-drive was the SSD and the
D-drive was the spinner, I deleted all the files from the (now)
D-drive.
I then restored onto the D-drive my data files from a backup
produced
on an older PC. Thus, the SSD is strictly for software; and the
spinner
is strictly for data.

To facilitate backing up by imaging full partitions, the SSD was
partitioned into C- and J-drives. This made the backups smaller; they
are even smaller because now I can do a full backup from C and an
incremetnal backup from J, reversing this in alternating backup
sessions. Yes, I also backup D. I try to put all non-Windows
software
on J, reserving C for Windows and those applications that insist on
running from a C-drive.

I had one "glitch" in all of this. Initially, the SSD had
partitions C
and D while the spinner was J. Office 2007 was installed in the D
partition. The drive letters for D and J were later switched
because I
had applications that expected their data to be on D. In the process,
Office 2007 remained on the D partition, which is now the spinner.
Thus, D is not strictly data.

I'm still stuck with this. I just can't boot from the new cloned SSD
drive. If I choose to boot from the new SSD drive (now named E:\) the
computer just boots from the old C: anyway. If I unplug the C drive and
switch the computer on with just the SSD connected then it won't
boot at
all. Any suggestions here welcome.


Follow what I did (what I actually had a PC guru do for me). This means
some hardware manipulation while your PC is turned off. After shutting
down your PC and unplugging it, open it up. Remove your C drive.
Remove your E drive and put it where your C drive used to be. What was
your E drive will then be recognized as your C drive for booting. Put
you prior C drive where the E-drive used to be.

Note that there's no need to do any of that hardware manipulation. The PC
doesn't care which drive bay holds the system/boot partitions.

As philo pointed out, do the clone operation, then shut down.
Disconnect the
old C: drive. Boot up. You should now be running from the newly cloned
drive.** Its letter will be C:. Shut down, reconnect the old C: drive,
boot, and now you should still be running from the new drive, but now
your
old C: drive should have a new drive letter. Decide what you want to
do with
it.

**If the system doesn't boot from the new clone, something went wrong
with
the clone operation. Try again.


OK I started from scratch and tried again but still no luck. Here is the
process I've gone through. The image below shows where I am to start
with. Disk 0 is the new SSD drive, which is starting out unallocated.
Disk 1 is the old hard drive. As you can see there are 3 partitions: My
OS and programs, files etc as well as a recovery partition and a tiny
third partition which Dell seem to have put on there.

http://postimg.org/image/qfx8jhp0x/

Next, I use EaseUS to do the clone. I clone just the C: partition, not
the whole disk and set the unallocated SSD as the destination drive.
EaseUS does the clone and then allocats the SSD as B:. This is where I'm
at before I shutdown:

http://postimg.org/image/nbz2gw9rl/

Then I shut down. I disconnent power and SATA cable from old C:. I then
swtch computer on hoping that it will boot from the new drive but get
the message "No boot device available press enter to retry". I've tried
switching on again and pressing F12 which takes me to a list of boot
options. If I choose the SSD drive from the list I am still presented
with the same error message. I can only boot up the computer by
reconnecting the old C:

Help!

You have the "OEM" config I've seen on a Dell.

To start with, Windows 7 can be installed on one partition or two partitions.
In other words, if a two partition install is done, *both* partitions
must be cloned to make an independent working disk.

For home users, if you start with a blank disk and install Win7 with
no special preparation, you see

System Reserved 100MB C: partition Many Gigabytes
"Active, System" "Boot"

Active is the boot flag - one partition on an MSDOS partitioning setup has the
boot flag, and the MBR code uses that to figure out
which partition "Starts" the system.

THe partition which starts the system is "System".

The majority of the OS, the actual runtime components are "Boot".

Microsoft named them the opposite of what you'd think.

The purpose of a two-partition installation, is BitLocker full disk
encryption support. The C: may be encrypted, but the system can
still boot off System Reserved because the files on it are not
encrypted via BitLocker. Not a lot of people use this.

*******

If a one partition installation is done, then it looks like

C: partition Many Gigabytes
"Active, System, Boot"

and in that case, the partition is self-sufficient. Cloning it is enough.

You can make such an installation by creating a single NTFS
partition to start with, and have the Win7 installer DVD
install into that single partition. It's smart enough not
to add other partitions.

*******

What your first image shows is that the RECOVERY partition is
big enough to contain an OEM supplier "image" of the OS suitable
for reinstallation. They make DVDs from that, in case the hard
drive fails, and you need to reinstall.

But your RECOVERY partition is also "Active, System". Which means
it has the boot flag, and has the boot files. You should find a
"boot" folder in that partition.

To successfully clone your partition, you need

MBR, RECOVERY, OS C:

Now, what about the 39MB OEM partition ? I'm not sure about that
one. Since it is ultra-tiny, I would clone it too.

*******

Now, say I'm one of those hot-shot computer people who
absolutely insists they're not going to let that
configuration get the best of them.

Options:

1) Reinstall retail Win7, using the license key on the COA.
Phone activation will be required. The OEM tools will be
removed and so on.

2) Do the "two partition to one partition" conversion procedure.

So let's get a link for (2). I have done this on Win7 and
it worked.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=409

The configuration changes would look like this. You could
do this on the source disk, as long as you have a backup
somewhere if things go wrong. I certainly had a backup
before I did this to my laptop.

MBR OEM Partition RECOVERY OS C:
39MB 14.81GB 283GB
System, Active Boot

When you're finished the procedure, the \boot folder in RECOVERY
is now on C:\boot. And the labels end up like this. The Active
thing requires moving the boot flag. It's possible
diskpart can do that. I used another tool (no longer available).

MBR OEM Partition RECOVERY OS C:
39MB 14.81GB 283GB
System, Active, Boot

The RECOVERY partition is still there. But it isn't necessary
to clone it.

Now, when I clone, the new SSD looks like this. I would throw
in the OEM Partition, just in case... I don't think it has
a purpose, but on an OEM machine, you cannot take chances.

MBR OEM Partition OS C:
39MB 283GB (~70GB used)
System, Active, Boot

So for the effort involved, you save 14.81GB. That assumes
the RECOVERY partition was relatively full when it was
discarded from the picture.

Since C: only uses 70GB, you could probably fit the
thing on a 100GB SSD by shrinking C: before cloning.
Or on some cloning programs, you can shrink "on the fly" and
the cloner will make it fit.

TO save additional C: space before cloning

powercfg -h off

That will delete the hiberfile. And also prevent hibernation.

You can also go to the panel that sets the Pagefile size,
and set it lower. Somewhere between 500MB and 1GB might
be enough to prevent the dialogs in that panel from
"whining" about the choice of size. My Win7 right now has
a 1GB pagefile, but I'm not tight for space. I just
don't need a practical pagefile (in stressful computing
situations, it just takes forever to fill or empty a
big pagefile).

Paul

Follow Paul's Terabyte link. Fixing what you have
is not a big deal, while leaving a special boot
partition in place is a pain in the neck for people
who use disk imaging. (As you're finding out.

On 28/10/2015 10:27, Paul wrote:
Hc wrote:
On 28/10/2015 03:03, Char Jackson wrote:
On Tue, 27 Oct 2015 17:05:14 -0700, "David E. Ross"

wrote:

On 10/27/2015 4:42 PM, Hc wrote:
On 27/10/2015 21:48, David E. Ross wrote:
On 10/27/2015 2:33 PM, David E. Ross wrote:
On 10/27/2015 9:12 AM, Hc wrote:
On 27/10/2015 15:16, Big Al wrote:
Hc wrote on 10/27/2015 11:11 AM:
Hi,

I have recently connected a new solid state drive to my PC.
When I
booted up Windows, windows installed the drivers
successfully. The new drive is listed in the device manager,
but when
I load up My Computer there is no sign on it. Any
ideas how I resolve this?

Thanks
Look in Disk Manager. Sometimes I've seen drives come up with
no drive
letter or the same as some other drive. Either case it's not
going to
show up.
Control Panel-Admin tools- Computer Management - Disk
Management.

Thanks for the help.

Perhaps you can help me further. I am planning on using this new
SSD
drive for operating system and programs to improve performance.
Windows
explorer now recognises the drive (I've called it S:\). I have
then used
EaseUS to clone my C: on to the S:. I've then rebooted and
loaded up the
BIOS at boot to boot the computer from this new S:, but it still
feels
as if I am still booting from the old slower C:. All programs
load up
from C: not S:. What should I do next? Wipe/format the old C:?


There are some routines -- both within Windows and non-Windows
applications -- that insist on running from a C-drive.

I went through the same process that you are attempting. The
first step
was to clone my C-drive (a spinner) to the new drive (D-drive, a
solid-state drive or SSD). Then my PC was shut down and opened
up. The
drives were removed and then switched as they were reinstalled.
Thus,
the C-drive became my D-drive and vice-versa. This has worked
very well.


I forgot to include the following --

After switching my drives so that the C-drive was the SSD and the
D-drive was the spinner, I deleted all the files from the (now)
D-drive.
I then restored onto the D-drive my data files from a backup
produced
on an older PC. Thus, the SSD is strictly for software; and the
spinner
is strictly for data.

To facilitate backing up by imaging full partitions, the SSD was
partitioned into C- and J-drives. This made the backups smaller;
they
are even smaller because now I can do a full backup from C and an
incremetnal backup from J, reversing this in alternating backup
sessions. Yes, I also backup D. I try to put all non-Windows
software
on J, reserving C for Windows and those applications that insist on
running from a C-drive.

I had one "glitch" in all of this. Initially, the SSD had
partitions C
and D while the spinner was J. Office 2007 was installed in the D
partition. The drive letters for D and J were later switched
because I
had applications that expected their data to be on D. In the
process,
Office 2007 remained on the D partition, which is now the spinner.
Thus, D is not strictly data.

I'm still stuck with this. I just can't boot from the new cloned SSD
drive. If I choose to boot from the new SSD drive (now named E:\) the
computer just boots from the old C: anyway. If I unplug the C drive
and
switch the computer on with just the SSD connected then it won't
boot at
all. Any suggestions here welcome.


Follow what I did (what I actually had a PC guru do for me). This
means
some hardware manipulation while your PC is turned off. After shutting
down your PC and unplugging it, open it up. Remove your C drive.
Remove your E drive and put it where your C drive used to be. What was
your E drive will then be recognized as your C drive for booting. Put
you prior C drive where the E-drive used to be.

Note that there's no need to do any of that hardware manipulation.
The PC
doesn't care which drive bay holds the system/boot partitions.

As philo pointed out, do the clone operation, then shut down.
Disconnect the
old C: drive. Boot up. You should now be running from the newly cloned
drive.** Its letter will be C:. Shut down, reconnect the old C: drive,
boot, and now you should still be running from the new drive, but now
your
old C: drive should have a new drive letter. Decide what you want to
do with
it.

**If the system doesn't boot from the new clone, something went wrong
with
the clone operation. Try again.


OK I started from scratch and tried again but still no luck. Here is
the process I've gone through. The image below shows where I am to
start with. Disk 0 is the new SSD drive, which is starting out
unallocated. Disk 1 is the old hard drive. As you can see there are 3
partitions: My OS and programs, files etc as well as a recovery
partition and a tiny third partition which Dell seem to have put on
there.

http://postimg.org/image/qfx8jhp0x/

Next, I use EaseUS to do the clone. I clone just the C: partition, not
the whole disk and set the unallocated SSD as the destination drive.
EaseUS does the clone and then allocats the SSD as B:. This is where
I'm at before I shutdown:

http://postimg.org/image/nbz2gw9rl/

Then I shut down. I disconnent power and SATA cable from old C:. I
then swtch computer on hoping that it will boot from the new drive but
get the message "No boot device available press enter to retry". I've
tried switching on again and pressing F12 which takes me to a list of
boot options. If I choose the SSD drive from the list I am still
presented with the same error message. I can only boot up the computer
by reconnecting the old C:

Help!

You have the "OEM" config I've seen on a Dell.

To start with, Windows 7 can be installed on one partition or two
partitions.
In other words, if a two partition install is done, *both* partitions
must be cloned to make an independent working disk.

For home users, if you start with a blank disk and install Win7 with
no special preparation, you see

System Reserved 100MB C: partition Many Gigabytes
"Active, System" "Boot"

Active is the boot flag - one partition on an MSDOS partitioning setup
has the
boot flag, and the MBR code uses that to
figure out
which partition "Starts" the system.

THe partition which starts the system is "System".

The majority of the OS, the actual runtime components are "Boot".

Microsoft named them the opposite of what you'd think.

The purpose of a two-partition installation, is BitLocker full disk
encryption support. The C: may be encrypted, but the system can
still boot off System Reserved because the files on it are not
encrypted via BitLocker. Not a lot of people use this.

*******

If a one partition installation is done, then it looks like

C: partition Many Gigabytes
"Active, System, Boot"

and in that case, the partition is self-sufficient. Cloning it is enough.

You can make such an installation by creating a single NTFS
partition to start with, and have the Win7 installer DVD
install into that single partition. It's smart enough not
to add other partitions.

*******

What your first image shows is that the RECOVERY partition is
big enough to contain an OEM supplier "image" of the OS suitable
for reinstallation. They make DVDs from that, in case the hard
drive fails, and you need to reinstall.

But your RECOVERY partition is also "Active, System". Which means
it has the boot flag, and has the boot files. You should find a
"boot" folder in that partition.

To successfully clone your partition, you need

MBR, RECOVERY, OS C:

Now, what about the 39MB OEM partition ? I'm not sure about that
one. Since it is ultra-tiny, I would clone it too.

*******

Now, say I'm one of those hot-shot computer people who
absolutely insists they're not going to let that
configuration get the best of them.

Options:

1) Reinstall retail Win7, using the license key on the COA.
Phone activation will be required. The OEM tools will be
removed and so on.

2) Do the "two partition to one partition" conversion procedure.

So let's get a link for (2). I have done this on Win7 and
it worked.

http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/kb/article.php?id=409

The configuration changes would look like this. You could
do this on the source disk, as long as you have a backup
somewhere if things go wrong. I certainly had a backup
before I did this to my laptop.

MBR OEM Partition RECOVERY OS C:
39MB 14.81GB 283GB
System, Active Boot

When you're finished the procedure, the \boot folder in RECOVERY
is now on C:\boot. And the labels end up like this. The Active
thing requires moving the boot flag. It's possible
diskpart can do that. I used another tool (no longer available).

MBR OEM Partition RECOVERY OS C:
39MB 14.81GB 283GB
System, Active, Boot

The RECOVERY partition is still there. But it isn't necessary
to clone it.

Now, when I clone, the new SSD looks like this. I would throw
in the OEM Partition, just in case... I don't think it has
a purpose, but on an OEM machine, you cannot take chances.

MBR OEM Partition OS C:
39MB 283GB (~70GB used)
System, Active, Boot

So for the effort involved, you save 14.81GB. That assumes
the RECOVERY partition was relatively full when it was
discarded from the picture.

Since C: only uses 70GB, you could probably fit the
thing on a 100GB SSD by shrinking C: before cloning.
Or on some cloning programs, you can shrink "on the fly" and
the cloner will make it fit.

TO save additional C: space before cloning

powercfg -h off

That will delete the hiberfile. And also prevent hibernation.

You can also go to the panel that sets the Pagefile size,
and set it lower. Somewhere between 500MB and 1GB might
be enough to prevent the dialogs in that panel from
"whining" about the choice of size. My Win7 right now has
a 1GB pagefile, but I'm not tight for space. I just
don't need a practical pagefile (in stressful computing
situations, it just takes forever to fill or empty a
big pagefile).

Paul

Thanks for this very comprehensive and detailed response. I can live
without the extra 14GB or so as I just need the SSD from programs and
operating system so to save time and effort I just cloned all three
partitions and I'm now in business. Thanks again for your help!

On Wed, 28 Oct 2015 09:54:11 +0000, Hc wrote:

OK I started from scratch and tried again but still no luck. Here is the
process I've gone through. The image below shows where I am to start
with. Disk 0 is the new SSD drive, which is starting out unallocated.
Disk 1 is the old hard drive. As you can see there are 3 partitions: My
OS and programs, files etc as well as a recovery partition and a tiny
third partition which Dell seem to have put on there.

http://postimg.org/image/qfx8jhp0x/

Next, I use EaseUS to do the clone. I clone just the C: partition, not
the whole disk

And that was your problem. You weren't cloning the disk, you were cloning a
partition. As you discovered, the MBR (boot code) doesn't live in that
partition, so your clone didn't include it and the new drive wouldn't boot.

When you previously said that you were cloning your drive, I incorrectly
assumed that you were cloning the entire drive. I see from your latest
follow-up that you figured it out and got it working, so all is well.


--

Char Jackson