Win7, SSD and the missing SATA drives.

[Scumbag]

Being a fool its taken me a long while to upgrade to Windows 7. Yesterday I installed it to a new SSD, plugged into the SATA III port and things seem to be nice and quick compared to the oddity of Vista, HOWEVER my old SATA HDDs seem to have gone and taken a walk when it comes to accessing the data in windows. My Computer simply lists the SSD as a C: drive, but bar that there is only the optical drive listed.
Going into the control panel it looks like the drives are recognized and are ready to start working, I just have not got the foggiest on how to make them actually accessible. Tried switching the SSD to SATA II and playing with a few boot processes in the BIOS (where all drives are showing up), but no dice in Windows itself.

Any advice from anyone?

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[kataras]

Try going into the drive management window (sorry I am at work and don't remember what it's called now) and activate/initialize the SATA drives. Something similar has happened to me a couple of times and this fixed it.

Edit: Permit me to slightly hijack the thread and ask: is there any benefit from installing games on the SSD (I am getting one soon)? Right now I have three partitions on 2 normal SATA HDDs: 1) only OS files (Win7/Ubuntu), 2)only games and steam and 3) Data like photos movies documents etc. I was thinking to put only OS files on the SSD, keep a 320GB SATA for games and the 1TB SATA for data.

[Rossi]

Go into Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management

Under Disk Management, find the drive you want, right click it, click Mark Partition as Active

This should make the drive available

[RogerMellie]

Edit: Permit me to slightly hijack the thread and ask: is there any benefit from installing games on the SSD (I am getting one soon)? Right now I have three partitions on 2 normal SATA HDDs: 1) only OS files (Win7/Ubuntu), 2)only games and steam and 3) Data like photos movies documents etc. I was thinking to put only OS files on the SSD, keep a 320GB SATA for games and the 1TB SATA for data.

You'll see a difference in load times in games for sure but to be honest, it's not massive.

I'd highly recommend SSDs for Windows as the difference is considerable but for games, it's not going to blow your mind.

At the end of the day it's one of those subjective things that some people will rave about and others will quietly wonder if it was really worth the extra wonga. I'm kind of closer to the latter re games.

[Scumbag]

Go into Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management

Under Disk Management, find the drive you want, right click it, click Mark Partition as Active

This should make the drive available

Cheers. I remember doing this in XP a lot, but never remembered needing to allocate a drive a letter for each new install.
Mix that with the fact I couldent see "Classic view" on the screen anywhere on the control panel and I end up tearing hair out.

[kataras]

You'll see a difference in load times in games for sure but to be honest, it's not massive.

I'd highly recommend SSDs for Windows as the difference is considerable but for games, it's not going to blow your mind.

At the end of the day it's one of those subjective things that some people will rave about and others will quietly wonder if it was really worth the extra wonga. I'm kind of closer to the latter re games.

thanks!
/10 chars

[Alex Bakke]

You'll see a difference in load times in games for sure but to be honest, it's not massive.

I'd highly recommend SSDs for Windows as the difference is considerable but for games, it's not going to blow your mind.

At the end of the day it's one of those subjective things that some people will rave about and others will quietly wonder if it was really worth the extra wonga. I'm kind of closer to the latter re games.

A friend has an SSD and he's found that it differs massively from game to game. It helps in games like ArmA2, because you often need to load a lot of content quite quickly to prevent stuttering etc.

[Themadcow]

Hmmmm, this falls a bit into my next decision as to whether to get a 2nd SSD for my Dell XPS17 (the first one has been... 'Steamed' full) at about £150 for another 256GB or pay £50 for a 320GB 7200 HDD (WD Scorpio Black). From what I've read so far, I might as well save the £100 and get the HDD? It'll mainly be for games and a little bit of media.

[djbriandamage]

Cheers. I remember doing this in XP a lot, but never remembered needing to allocate a drive a letter for each new install.
Mix that with the fact I couldent see "Classic view" on the screen anywhere on the control panel and I end up tearing hair out.

I believe assigning drive letters is a new requirement of the NTFS FAT table, or some such.

In the future if you don't feel like perusing the control panel just type "disk management" into the Start menu search bar and press enter.

[kataras]

A friend has an SSD and he's found that it differs massively from game to game. It helps in games like ArmA2, because you often need to load a lot of content quite quickly to prevent stuttering etc.

By the way Alex, your friend was right. Thanks!