Hard drive not recognised by the computer

[rajiv-]

I have a brand new HP Envy desktop.  I installed one hard drive in it and the system recognized it without problems.  Then I installed a second one and the system does not see it.  I checked connections and they were fine.  The bios does not show hard drives anywhere and so there is nothing to check.  So I did these tests by just changing the cable connection between the hard drives and mother board:

(1) Drives 1 and 2 connected - Drive 1 is visible in OS

(2) Drive 1 connected, 2 disconnected - Drive 1 is visible in OS

(3) Drive 1 disconnected, drive 2 connected - Drive 2 is visible in OS

Clearly the system is not able to see two hard drives simultaneously.  In all cases the system boots off a SSD on m.2 socket, so that does not change.

I saw a message that changing the delay in Power on options in bios will fix the problem.  My bios does not have setting.

I called HP for support, but since the hard drives are mine, new PC support will not help me.

Does anybody have an idea why this should happen?

[BeemerBiker]

I have seen this before when both drives have the same disk signature.  Windows gives a warning about identical drives and only one will be on-line.

I was unable to find a bios simulator so I am going to guess the following boot options are available

Temporarily select legacy boot order in bios (do not save bios when done)

UEFI will be grayed out and Legacy will be enabled

expand internal drives and see if your SATA drives are listed.

If they do not show up then possibly a hardware problem.  Check the SATA both data and power are on correctly and fully seated both on motherboard and HDD.

Exit the bios but do not save settings

bring up windows

1 If both drives show up in bios then bring up the "Create and format" tool and look for the second drive

I assume you  have formatted one of the drives already.

2 possibly the drive is recognized but is off line (duplicate signature)

Open the windows command prompt in administrator mode and run the diskpart app to see if the drives are all online

post back with what you find.

[rajiv- · Accepted solution]

Thanks a lot for your help.

I am a novice, so I found your suggestion of using diskpart very useful.  This is what was happening- I had these two hard drives defined as mirrored volumes on my Windows 10 PC.  That PC failed so I brought the hard drives over to my new Win 11 PC.  I thought the new PC does not know anything about my previous mirroring.  Turns out mirroring information got carried on by the hard drives.  So the new PC put these two volumes as mirrored drives.  That is why I did not see additional disk space when I added the new volume.  Diskpart helped me figure this out.

Thanks again.