Do Hard Drives Need Drivers

[Pinkie Mclucas]

Myapologies for the Category not being exactly correct. I have a legacy My Book external 1tb hard drive that my Windows 10 laptop will not recognize. It shows up in Device Manager as 'SYMWAVE WDC WD10EAVS-32D SCSI Disk Device but does not show up in Windows Explorer.

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I have the same problem, and yes, we do need new driver, new firmware. When I connect with Windows 10 I get an error. My white WD My Book World Edition works fine with my Windows 7 machine. It used to work just fine with my Windows 10 machine.

"Your new Western Digital My Passport/My Book hard drive requires a special communications channel (SCSI) between your PC and the drive to enable certain features such as password protection, LED control, and access to the drives label if applicable.

At install, the Windows operating system detects this SCSI communications channel and attempts to install a SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) driver. This driver is only used by your hard drive and is installed by default when you first attach the drive to a computer.

However if you did not install the driver upon first install and chose not to install WD Smartware, Windows will continue to prompt you to install the driver each time you connect the drive to a computer. This will continue to occur unless the SES driver is installed."

I despair. I own a Dell XPS 420th. Now I wanted to reinstall Windows (7, 32bit) and erased the hard drive completely (unfortunately the OEM-partition, too).

The BIOS detects the hard disk, but not the Windows-setup. I am asked for drivers there.

It is a Hitachi HDS721075KLA330 (750 GB, SATA).

What can I do? Where can I find this driver?

In the process of formatting the drive, did you also create a partition? I would try deleting the partition and returning it to your problem machine to see if anything changes. Also, see what options are available to you in Windows 7 setup under "Advanced Options". See if anything there will allow you to change things on the disk. Among other tools you should find options to create and delete partitions, and resize existing partitions. If you can get the tools to work, you might be able to get the MBR back into a shape that the setup program will recognize.

EDIT: The advanced options I'm describing is labled "Drive Options (Advanced)" at the lower right of the screen that should be showing you the available disks. This option only shows up if you boot from the Windows DVD.

Most of the drivers in the Serial ATA section are firmware updates for specific hard drives and will work only if you have that particular model hard drive installed. You need to prepare the Intel pre-install driver as it is a self-extracting zip file which Windows setup will not touch.

Copy the Intel file to a folder on a working computer. Double click the file and you should get a box asking you if you want to run the file. Click whatever button means "yes". The next box should tell you that the files are about to be extracted and will list a path in the lower of two text boxes. To the right of the lower box you will see a small button with two periods in it (..). Click that box and browse to the folder you are already using for the zipped file and select that folder. The contents will be extracted to the folder.

Once you have the contents of the zipped file, copy them to a folder on a USB memory stick. Use the "F6" prompt to tell Windows setup that you need to install a SCSI driver and direct it to the folder on the memory stick that contains the contents you extracted earlier. Windows setup should present you with a selection of controller chips; select ICH9R. Setup should continue.

With regard to the empty setup window; did you select a custom install and go to the option that allows you to create and delete partitions? You need to manually create a partition and format it in order to see something in the setup window.

The error is, when setup is asking: "Where do you want to install windows?" The window is empty, no drive to choose. Just the option "load drivers". (BTW: I am german and just translated what I see there.)

Exactly what error to you get when you run Windows setup? Windows Vista and Windows 7 both have difficulty detecting a drive if there is more than one drive present in the system. One way to get around that is to use the custom install option and manually partition and format the desired hard drive before you select the option to install. You should also remember to disable or unplug any USB devices (other than keyboard and mouse) while attempting to install Windows. This is especially true for any card reader devices you may have.

EDIT: By the way, you can find the drivers for your system here: XPS 420 Drivers. Use the link at the top of the page to choose Vista 32 bit. These drivers should work for Windows 7 32 bit as the two operating systems share the same kernel. If the advice above didn't help, you can try the Serial ATA Intel Pre-Install driver. I believe it is the last file in the Serial ATA list under Windows Vista 32 bit. Be careful while you download. The page tends to flip back to the BIOS default after downloading a file and using the "back" arrow on the browser to go back to the driver files list.

What does your hardware setup tell you? The hard drive should be plugged into SATA 0. That port should be turned On or set to Auto, whichever is available. The SATA controller operation should be set to RAID On. If your SATA controller is already set to RAID On, and things are still not working, you might try changing the setting to RAID Autodetect/ATA. That setting uses the older drivers for IDE/ATA drives and sometimes gives less trouble.

The driver on the USB stick may indeed not have a choice for your system because you are attempting to install Windows 7 using a Vista driver. I believe the choice stating that it is for an ICH9R hub would be the correct one.

I extracted all the drivers before and tried to use them with an usb-stick. There is a checkbox in windows-setup which hides drivers which are not for my system. I have to uncheck this first then the Intel-drivers are shown (so it seems they arent for my system).

I tried it, but unfortunately no changes. Or maybe a little bit: Now it showed me an Intel-driver (without unchecking these box), but after installing that driver, there is no drive available like before ...

What did you use to erase the drive? Some of the programs that completely wipe the drive leave information in the beginning sectors that keep Windows setup from recognizing the drive as being unformatted. It is my understanding that this is a safety measure to help owners avoid erasing data that they want to keep. I have no direct experience, but I've been told that a linux live bootable CD that has FDISK on it can be used to reset the sectors that contain the Master Boot Record. Once the MBR has been set to a neutral state, Windows setup recognizes the disk again.

On the SATA setting, what you have seen makes sense because the ICH9R driver is for the disk controller on the main board, not for the hard drive itself. So we now know that your drivers file works correctly, and since that did not help find the disk, the problem must be something to do with the hard drive itself. Just to be sure that the hard drive is still working properly, you should run the diagnostics to be sure that the hard drive has not coincidentally failed.

As far as I understood you, you want to replace an Ubuntu Linux installation by Windows 10. As others have already proposed, it is recommended to remove the partition table with its partition scheme first. You may also create an empty partition table and then let the Windows installer create the needed partitions for a Windows 10 installation and your undisclosed system firmware boot mode.

So you want to use a MBR partitioning scheme as UEFI with GPT partitioning scheme would need several partitions and NTFS may not be used for the EFI partition. But the OP did not pronounce such preferences.

If your internal hard drive is not showing up, it might be because it is not initialized or it needs formatting. Ensure your disk is properly connected to the motherboard with the SATA cable. Due to some BIOS settings, your HDD might also not be visible in Windows 10.

Greetings, through attempted hard drive scans and system repairs the hard drive for my HP Pavillion 15 cx0049nr has been bricked, and windows no longer recognizes it as storage. I need the driver for it (HGST HTS721010A9E630 so I can direct the windows installer to load the driver and recognize it as storage again, and then I can reinstall windows on it. I cannot use the HP support driver tool because the system will not boot and the hard drive is inaccessible at the moment.

Hard drives don't have special drivers. They use the standard SATA drivers that are built into Windows and loaded by the setup media. If your drive is not being seen, there is a hardware failure with the drive.

I ask because I am unable to boot from a clone of the internal drive that is sitting in the external enclosure, and I'm told this can happen when the drive you are trying to boot from requires a different driver from the one you cloned from. I have posted a specific question about the boot issue here. I don't want to duplicate that but in response to the comment asking for further detail, I have another external drive and am able to boot Win 10 from that drive so I don't think it's a general problem with Windows not being bootable from external drives. The cloned system is Win 11.

1: I say supposedly because the packaging for the drive that's in the enclosure says PCIe 4.0 but a sticker on the back says SATA, and the enclosure supports both. I don't know how to check which is actually in use.

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