wont recognize my hard drive yet it shows up in my BIOS

[johnnyhandsome]

went to upgrade from windows 10 home edition to windows pro 10. And when I went to install I deleted the recovery drive and merge it with the other drive and now my software can't find the drive. I go to install and  the BIOS sees the drive but won't show up on the install. i did several of the DISKPART steps I have seen still nothing. I'm in the install now did a F10 when I do a list disk to shows (there are no fixed disk to show) yet when I go into BIOS it shows it there. in Bios under device cinfiguration for drives. please help

[WAWood]

@johnnyhandsome

When you say you merged the former Recovery drive with the OS drive, you mean you expanded the OS drive to include the new unallocated space created by removing the Recovery drive, right?

In OEM PCs, there is typically a boot partition, or in the case of UEFI PCs, an ESD partition, and those are used to boot Windows.  IF you tampered with those in any way, your PC will no longer boot.

The BIOS will see the drive even if it is unformatted or formatted incorrectly, but Windows will not.

I don't off-hand know how you would Upgrade an HP OEM Win7 Home to Pro, as those take very different product keys and the one in your PC only works for Home.  Did you try doing this with a Windows file you downloaded from Microsoft?

And finally, the installer will typically list all the drives it finds on the device, so it is showing any other drives, or is it simply not showing anything?

[johnnyhandsome]

I went into Diskpart and merged the drives and then lost the recovery by doing that.

[WAWood]

@johnnyhandsome

Sorry, still not clear on what you did.

First off, despite the claim, Diskpart can not "merge" two partitions into one; instead, what it does is actually "extend" a partition to include unallocated space.  Some call this space an "unallocated partition", but that is incorrect because for space to be a partition, it has to be "allocated".

Thus, to actually "merge" the space occupied by the Recovery drive and the OS drive together, you would first have to Delete the Recovery drive, and then Extend the OS drive to include that space.

So, if you Delete the Recovery drive, then of course you would lose that space.

However, the PC still should have booted OK and still be working OK.