dudlashmiga Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 Hi All, As per title, whenever I try to install Windows 7 on my Force 3 120GB SSD drive the install cannot see the SSD drive. The Force 3 is the only drive in the machine except the DVD drive (IDE). I've tried the install on three mobos so far, first the Gigabyte GA-Z68MA-D2H-B3, the second is an Intel Xeon reference board and the third one is an MSI 9625 mobile Intel mobo. In all three cases the installation portion of Windows 7 does not see the drive. I've read quite a few threads here but haven't found a similar case. Can anyone help or put me in the right direction? Thanks, Rob Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trickmasterpc Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 If you can't see it in the BIOS 1) Set your SATA controller to AHCI mode 2) Make sure you have a SATA III cable 3) Make sure you have the latest firmware for your drive If you can see it in the BIOS and have a running version of Win7 but can't see it 1) Right click on My Computer 2) Select Manage 3) Select Storage then Disk Management 4) Click on "Action" and rescan disks (see if it appears, if it does initialize the disk) If you are installing a fresh copy of Win7 1) When it asks you to load a driver load the SATA or RAID driver for the controller you have the drive hooked up to. Sometimes windows doesn't have the right inherent driver. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dudlashmiga Posted October 3, 2011 Author Share Posted October 3, 2011 Thanks for the reply trickmaster, Forgot to mention that the drive is seen by BIOS. This as a matter of fact is a second drive, I returned the first one thinking it was faulty. I am indeed trying to install windows 7 on the drive - Windows 7 doesn't need any drivers for the HDD controllers as I have managed to install Windows 7 on a WD drive without any drivers. Any more suggestions? Regards, Rob Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toasted Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 Disconnect any other hard drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dudlashmiga Posted October 3, 2011 Author Share Posted October 3, 2011 Yup I have, no dice :( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toasted Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 Reset your BIOS by shorting the pins or removing the battery. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trickmasterpc Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 Slave your drive to a comp running windows and try this If you can see it in the BIOS and have a running version of Win7 but can't see it 1) Right click on My Computer 2) Select Manage 3) Select Storage then Disk Management 4) Click on "Action" and rescan disks (see if it appears, if it does initialize the disk) If you can see it in the BIOS it should show up in Windows. It's not a faulty drive if you cna see it in the BIOS Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dudlashmiga Posted October 3, 2011 Author Share Posted October 3, 2011 Just tried that, no joy. But isnt this a bit suspicious that the install cant see the drive on 3 different mobos? Am I looking at another possibly faulty batch? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dudlashmiga Posted October 3, 2011 Author Share Posted October 3, 2011 If you can see it in the BIOS it should show up in Windows. It's not a faulty drive if you cna see it in the BIOS It does show up in BIOS and I can see it as a secondary drive in Windows, can even format it and copy data to it. But when it comes to Windows 7 install its just not there at all - on three different machines as well! What does that mean? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toasted Posted October 3, 2011 Share Posted October 3, 2011 If one of your systems have Windows installed see if you can update the firmware http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=99366 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dudlashmiga Posted October 3, 2011 Author Share Posted October 3, 2011 If one of your systems have Windows installed see if you can update the firmware http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=99366 Thanks toasted, I wondered if there was a firmware update for this drive. I'll try this tomorrow and report. Regards, Rob Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
trickmasterpc Posted October 4, 2011 Share Posted October 4, 2011 There's an AHCI fix on this site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976 This may fix your issue. It worked for me when I slaved my drive to my wife's computer for the firmware upgrade. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dudlashmiga Posted October 10, 2011 Author Share Posted October 10, 2011 There's an AHCI fix on this site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976 This may fix your issue. It worked for me when I slaved my drive to my wife's computer for the firmware upgrade. Firmware upgrade unfortunately didnt fix the issue! :( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dudlashmiga Posted October 10, 2011 Author Share Posted October 10, 2011 There's an AHCI fix on this site: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976 This may fix your issue. It worked for me when I slaved my drive to my wife's computer for the firmware upgrade. I don't understand what difference will this make when the Windows 7 Install portion cannot see the drive! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yellowbeard Posted October 10, 2011 Share Posted October 10, 2011 Try a different SATA cable. I've seen the symptom you have with substandard SATA cables. If that does not fix it, RMA the drive and we'll replace it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dudlashmiga Posted October 10, 2011 Author Share Posted October 10, 2011 Try a different SATA cable. I've seen the symptom you have with substandard SATA cables. If that does not fix it, RMA the drive and we'll replace it. I have so far tried installing windows 7 on this drive on 4 different machines with 4 different sets of components incl. SATA cables. This is a second drive that I received as a replacement for a drive that was doing the same thing :( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
func Posted October 20, 2011 Share Posted October 20, 2011 Hi I have the exact same problem. Have you found a solution yet ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Toasted Posted October 21, 2011 Share Posted October 21, 2011 Secure erase the SSD and re-install Windows. Tutorial http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=85344 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mcot Posted December 11, 2011 Share Posted December 11, 2011 Hi. I realize this thread is a bit old, but I just had the same exact problem and found an answer. The answer comes from here: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_install/windows-7-installer-will-not-recognize-ssd/80a83aed-56dc-438c-a65e-a0ea815ce551 Occasionally, Windows setup can chuck a fit when it discovers a drive with an invalid MBR/boot sector and won't install to it. To fix this, you could try the following 1.Boot up Windows 7 disc. 2.When the welcome screen comes up on Windows Setup, press Shift + F10, which will display a command prompt. 3.Type "diskpart" (no quotes) and press enter. 4.Type "list disk" and press enter. 5.Hopefully you can see your SSD in the list. You should see a number identifying it. Now type "select disk X" (where X is the number identifying your SSD) and press enter. 6.Type "clean" and press enter. This will write a blank MBR, YOU WILL LOSE ANY DATA ON THE SSD if you did have anything on it. Hopefully one of these tips helps : ) I don't know if this can be added to any sort of sticky. Here is the problem I had and the steps I went through before this fix. Problem: Windows 7 installer doesn't show the drive when you click on the option to do a fresh install. 1.) SSD is seen in the bios. 2.) ACHI Mode Enabled 3.) BIOS flash my asus G73jh 4.) Enable UEFI mode in bios 5.) Connected drive as secondary drive and it is seen by computer as normal. 6.) Formatted drive as ntfs and it worked. 7.) Checked firmware and it was the latest (1.3.3 as of this writing). So yah, why are these drives shipping with a bad MBR? Really really hard to diagnose and I think they are going to get a lot of RMA's on good drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zackmarch Posted December 17, 2011 Share Posted December 17, 2011 I am having the exact same problem. I am using a motherboard with a Marvell controller, so I cannot do the Firmware Update. The drive shows up in windows, I was able to format it and use it in windows, but not in the windows installer. I tried various Sata cables. My Bios is updated, and I have followed the above steps where possible. My system is set to AHCI mode. I can see the the SSD in the Bios, in the Post and in Windows, the only place I cannot see it is in the Windows installer. Oh and I am using a Force GT 60 gb. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madnisman Posted December 17, 2011 Share Posted December 17, 2011 @zackmarch: Have you tried to install Windows with all other drives disconnected (except 1 SSD and 1 optical drive)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zackmarch Posted December 17, 2011 Share Posted December 17, 2011 @zackmarch: Have you tried to install Windows with all other drives disconnected (except 1 SSD and 1 optical drive)? @madnisman Thank you for the reply, and yes I have tried that. In fact I took my system totally barebones, 1 stick of ram, 1 vid card, 1 HD, 1 Optical and tried it that way, with no luck. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
technolog Posted December 18, 2011 Share Posted December 18, 2011 @madnisman Thank you for the reply, and yes I have tried that. In fact I took my system totally barebones, 1 stick of ram, 1 vid card, 1 HD, 1 Optical and tried it that way, with no luck. i was in the same boat with u before i discover something silly. i tried to use my f60 as raid 0 before after that i put in to my new machine and bios see drive but win 7 setup not. so i enabled raid rom in my mobo ctrl i get me to raid configuration, its showing my drive as one of the pairs of raid 0, so delete raid volume and make it non raid solve my problem.maybe this helps Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pfaustino Posted June 12, 2013 Share Posted June 12, 2013 I was with Dell support trying to get this fixed to no avail until I was told they were closing in 10 minutes... My setup was 2 1TB raid drives that originally had Windows 7 installed but crashed and unrecoverable. I also had a Corsair SSD drive where I wanted to install Windows 7. In the "Where do you want to install Windows" screen, it was reporting my 2 drives (now set to non raid via BIOS) erroneously. The first drive was correct, unallocated at 1TB. The second drive had 5 partitions totalling 2TB. Strange since I only had a total of 2TB between the 2 drives, not 3TB. Anyway, I wasn't interested in the 2 drives. I was interested in installing Windows 7 to the 3rd drive, my Corsair 120GB SSD drive. The problem was no matter what I did (New, Format) to this SSD drive, the error message that everyone is talking about kept coming up. At one point, the Dell technician instructed me to remove the 2 drives but they had to close and I was on my own. Rather than do this, I decided to give up all hope of recovering files from the 2 drives and decided to delete the partitions from the 2nd drive. When I did this, both drives finally had 1TB of unallocated space each. At this point, I was able to install Windows 7 on the SSD drive!!! Moral of the story? If a drive is reporting the wrong size, Windows 7 gets confused and won't want to install to another drive even though that drive had the correct size. I just reset all the drives to unallocated and it worked! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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