Vista quit seeing my SATA HDD

[jasonbond007]

I recently installed a 1TB WD HDD in my Vista x64 computer. I went through the normal Disk Management steps, formatted and assigned a drive letter, all of that. Used it for several days. My main HDD was almost full so I moved a few things over. Then, all of a sudden it quit seeing it. It's not listed as a drive in explorer. In Disk Management I can see the partition in the window on the bottom but it's not listed in the window at the top with my main HDD. When I right click on the partition and choose Change Drive Letter it gives me an error say to refresh or reboot but nothing I do will make this work. I do not want to format it because I need the info on the disk. I tried converting it to dynamic but that hasn't really helped. It now lists it in the top window but without a drive letter and won't let me assign one. Any thoughts??

[jasonbond007]

As a side note.. I just realized that my computer is also not recognizing USB flash drives.

[JorgeM]

So, in device manager, does it mark the drive as "foreign" in the bottom window? Have you tried connecting this drive to another computer, via a USB/SATA interface to see if you can read it properly?

[hotmatrixx]

My first thought would be to go to the device's manufacturer's pages and download any applicable drivers (IDE, SATA, RAID, USB, HOST CONTROLLER, ACHPI, CHIPSET DRIVERS), and also to see if there are any firmaware updates for the motherboard, both on the computer's driver support site and on the actual motherboard manufacturer's site.

It's surprising how often a driver update installed from Windows' automatic updates feature can break a perfectly fine computer.

in the meantime, you could try putting it into another machine and see if the issue persists.