Member Avatar for hardk0re

Hey,

I have four hard drives in my computer; 2 by sata and 2 by ide. The two that are attached by ide are connected using an ide card. However, once I upgraded from Vista to Windows 7, my computer is suddenly unable to find the two hard drives. I think I may need a driver to get the ide card working, but I have no idea.... Can anyone help me?

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by vinothsrd

Dani AI

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Quick checklist and focused steps to narrow this down — based on the thread: has two IDE drives hanging off a PCI IDE card that disappeared after a Vista→Windows 7 upgrade. and pointed toward OS/driver checks; the steps below extend that with firmware-level and hardware isolation so you don’t chase the wrong cause.

First, check firmware (BIOS/UEFI). Reboot and confirm whether the BIOS/UEFI detects the two IDE drives. If the BIOS does not see them the problem is almost certainly hardware (power, ribbon orientation, jumpers, a failed card or cable). Try: power-cycling, reseating the IDE ribbon, testing one drive alone (set its jumper to master if you have only one device on the cable), and moving the IDE card to another PCI slot or the drives to a different machine to verify they spin up and are recognized.

If the BIOS does see the drives but Windows 7 does not, get a low-level view from the OS before changing anything important (don’t initialize disks you need data from). From an elevated Command Prompt run:

wmic diskdrive get Model,InterfaceType,Caption,Size
diskpart
  list disk
  exit

If DiskPart shows the physical disks but Windows Explorer or the volume manager doesn’t show partitions, stop — do not initialize or format. That usually means a partition/metadata problem (or removed driver layer). A live Linux USB (or a WinPE/Rescue USB) can confirm whether a non-Windows tool sees partitions; it’s useful for data recovery if needed.

If the controller is the suspect (controller missing or shown as unknown in Device Manager), record the controller name/hardware IDs (Device Manager → Properties → Details → Hardware Ids) and check whether drivers exist for your Windows 7 bitness. If no compatible driver is available, options are: temporarily attach the drives to another machine or a USB-to-IDE adapter to recover data, or replace the IDE controller with one that has explicit Windows 7 support. Avoid formatting or initializing any drive that contains data until you’re sure the partition table is readable.

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Member Avatar for sinnerFA

What IDE controller? When you look @ the device manager does any of the items have a yellow excalaimation or a description of unknown?
If there is nothing wrong in the device manager then you need to goto disk manager and just add a mountpoint (i.e. E:, F:, etc...)
To get to the Disk Manager: In the search box type diskmgmt.msc, typing the command then the file will appear in the box, just click the file to open the tool.

HTH's
sinnerFA

Member Avatar for Adamsappleone

You might have to go to the manufacturers website of the IDE card and obtain the IDE Controller drivers from them.

Member Avatar for vinothsrd

But what I suggest is to use the SATA cable instead of IDE since you've windows 7... That will work better and more faster... There are many compatibility issues with IDE on windows 7...

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