Before updating the BIOS, both of my SATA drives worked normally and were formatted correctly. I had not updated the BIOS on my MSI B550 Tomahawk Max WiFi motherboard in nearly four years. Since the update, the two M.2 drives still work, and the SATA drives appear in the BIOS, but they do not show up in Windows Disk Management or the partitioning tools. They are connected to SATA ports 3 and 4. BIOS is set to AHCI rather than RAID. Could the update have changed another storage setting, or is this likely a driver issue? If Windows cannot see the drives, how should I install or troubleshoot the necessary drivers?
1 Answer
Check the motherboard’s SATA controller settings in BIOS. A BIOS update may have restored storage defaults or changed the controller mode, even if AHCI is already selected. Also verify that the SATA controller itself is enabled and that the affected ports have not been disabled by an M.2 slot configuration. On some boards, certain M.2 sockets share bandwidth with specific SATA ports, so try moving the drives to different SATA ports, such as ports 1 and 2, and check whether Windows detects them. Since the drives appear in BIOS, this is less likely to be a basic driver problem.
AHCI is definitely enabled, so I’ll check whether the SATA controller or those particular ports were disabled and test the drives on different ports.