SSD Blue not recognized

I am trying to reinstall my windows 7 64bit on my HP Pavilion because my hard drive is dying. I have a new 500gb Western Digital Blue SSD. I formatted the drive in NTFS format, installed it and booted up the system from the windows 7 dvd. The drive is listed in the bios, but is not shown in the installation screen as being an option to where I can install windows. It is telling me I need to install a mass storage driver.

How do I fix this? Is there a driver that I need?

The answers to these questions might help you get an answer to your problem.

  1. Has your old drive been removed?
  2. How is the new SSD installed? (USB cable or SATA port inside your PC)
  3. Are you trying to clone your Win 7 install from your old drive or are you doing a “Custom” install of Win 7?

Let me see if i can explain. The existing drive in my pc is dying, so i’m going to replace it with the new SSD. When i connect the ssd via usb in an enclosure, the system sees it. It installs whatever drivers it needs and I was able to format it in ntfs. I shut down the system, swapped the ssd for the old drive, booted with the windows disc to start the installation and the drive doesn’t show in the installation screen to allow me to select it as a location where I can install windows. This is the problem. It works fine when I connect it via usb.

The WD SSD Dashboard has a “Tools” section. From there you can erase the drive. Pretty sure this will remove the partition and formatting you have done. Connect it on your USB port and open the dashboard and try erasing the drive. Once it’s erased don’t format it. Just shutdown the PC and install it in the PC and remove the old dying drive. See if Windows installation will pick it up then.

I figured it out. The Sata controller in the bios was set to raid. I changed it to ahci and I was able to see the drive at the windows installation screen and do the install.

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Dang I love a success story! Glad to see you solved the problem!

I am having the exact same issue. Pretty sure the Dashboard software is buggy. Literally every other SSD monitoring software I have tried reports the drive in good health, including smartmontools and CrystalInfo. Indeed, the Dashboard’s own SMART tests show good health. It is only the status indicator in the OP’s picture that show this. Weird.

with regards
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Cannot create a topic would like to no if the WD Blue SSD drives are compatible with Sata II?

Thanks.