My MSI B450 Tomahawk Max has an M.2 NVMe drive and a Samsung 870 EVO 2TB SATA SSD used for extra storage. The SATA SSD suddenly disappeared from Windows, even though the BIOS still detects it by name and reports its full capacity.
The drive does not appear in Disk Management, Device Manager, Diskpart, or Samsung Magician. I have tried different SATA ports and cables, separate SATA power cables and PSU ports, updating the BIOS, resetting CMOS, and switching SATA mode from AHCI to RAID and back. An older HDD connected to the same ports and cables also appears in BIOS but not in Windows.
I booted Hiren's Boot CD and the Samsung drive is visible and seems functional there, so the hardware and data appear accessible outside the normal Windows installation. What Windows setting, driver, or storage-controller issue could cause both drives to disappear only in Windows?
1 Answer
Since both the SSD and the older HDD work or are visible in a live environment, the SATA controller and drives are probably not completely dead. This points more toward a Windows storage-driver or filter-driver problem. Install the latest AMD chipset drivers for the B450 board, then check Device Manager under Storage controllers and IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers for errors. You can also uninstall the affected storage-controller entries and reboot so Windows redetects them, then use Disk Management's Action > Rescan Disks. Avoid switching between AHCI and RAID again unless you have prepared Windows for that mode, since it can make the system unbootable.
Hiren's Boot CD does detect the Samsung drive and it appears usable there. I also updated Windows to the latest available build, but the drive is still missing from the regular Windows installation.