Troubleshooting: Cannot see your Hard Drive or SSD in Windows 7 Setup
Description: When hard drives or SSDs come from a manufacturer sometimes you can receive one that has not been initialized, you can follow these steps to initialize your hard drive or SSD.
- Put in your Windows 7 CD into your computer and start the setup.
- Once in the Windows 7 setup screen press Shift + F10, this will bring up the Command Prompt.
- Now type in diskpart then press the Enter key.
- Then type in list disk then press the Enter key.
- If you see more than one disk show on the list, select the disk that you want to initialize. In this case we will use disk 0, type select disk 0 then press the Enter key.
- To remove any partitions and volume formatting type Clean then press the Enter key.
- Now we need to create a partition on the disk. Type create partition primary then press the Enter key.
- Now we need to select the new partition for the next steps, type select partition 1 then press the Enter key.
- Now we need to make the new partition active, type Active then press the Enter key.
- Now to format the partition, type format fs=ntfs quick then press the Enter key.
- Now we can exit disk part, type Exit then press the Enter key.
- Then we can now exit out of command prompt by typing Exit then press the Enter key. Your hard drive or SSD should now show under the Windows 7 setup!
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