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2nd HDD not detecting in BIOS

Super User Asked by harist0x on December 29, 2021

I have 2 HDDs. One has Windows 7 installed, which is working.

The second HDD is being used for Ubuntu. I wanted to install Windows 10 in 2nd HDD alongside Ubuntu. I partitioned installed Windows 10 from a USB, after completion of installation, the computer restarted. It boot to the BIOS, and I couldn’t boot to anything on the 2nd HDD. The 1st HDD with windows 7 was bootable.

Restarting again did not fix the issue. Changing out the SATA cable or hard drive did not help detect the drive. Everything but the 2nd HDD is detected. What happened?

There’s some important data on the 2nd HDD, so I can’t just reinstall.

2 Answers

Rest assured your data isn't gone, just inaccessible. You've (or rather Microsoft) hosed your boot sector/record on 2nd HDD. Windows aggressively takes over that so it's best suggested to install Windows THEN Linux. Complicating things is you want 3 OS's so booting IS going to be complex & I'd suggest against it based on how you worded your question. It's possible you'll just need to make use of the BIOS device boot menu & get familiar with boot loaders in Windows & Linux: https://www.howtogeek.com/193669/whats-the-difference-between-gpt-and-mbr-when-partitioning-a-drive/

How to access data:

  1. You MAY be able to access data when booted to Win7 on first HDD. If you don't see the drive in 'My Computer' you may have to assign it a drive letter in Disk Management as @ctles advised. If it asks you to format don't do that. The issue might be something unique to Win7 so could try drive in a Win10 PC
  2. You can boot off a linux live CD or USB drive (I like UBCD which has Parted Magic) & access the drive data that way. Copy it to somewhere else by using a USB drive or uploading to cloud server

Answered by gregg on December 29, 2021

Did you go to the "disk management" in "computer management" to see if the drive pops up there but is offline?

Answered by ctles on December 29, 2021

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