Solved:Acer Laptop Hard Drive Not Detected

Scenario

"My laptop (Acer Aspire 5570Z) while booting says hard disk not detected. It all happened suddenly. Nothing was wrong with my hard disk as well, my hard disk is 4 months old (HITACHI TRAVELSTAR) and my notebook is 1 year old. This hard drive is very vital for me; I really need your help. Thank you!"

Causes and solutions to Acer laptop hard drive not detected

There are 3 main reasons why Acer laptop hard drives not recognized or detected. Next, I will walk you through them one by one and offer the corresponding solutions.

1. The drive is not enabled in the BIOS

If your Acer laptop internal hard disk is not detected, maybe it has been turned off in System Setup. It is also known as the System BIOS or sometimes CMOS Setup. Therefore, you should enable it in System Setup. Some motherboard manufacturers disable the unused ports in the BIOS by default. You need to enter the System BIOS to verify their current state. Different manufacturers have methods to enter System BIOS. For example, you can press F2 to enter the System BIOS for Acer and Dell computer.

Besides, you can try to change the disk controller setting from AHCI to IDE in BIOS Setup. It is a method that worth trying according to the feedback of some computer users who have the similar issue.

2. Faulty or unplugged data cable

When you find Acer laptop hard disk is not detected in BIOS, you should inspect the hard drive connections and the motherboard. Do not be cheated by seemingly normal cable from the exterior, any folding, creasing, crimping data cable can cause the wires to break inside the insulation.

The BIOS will not detect the Acer laptop hard disk if the data cable is damaged or the connection is incorrect. Serial ATA cables, in particular, can sometimes fall out of their connection. Be sure to check your SATA cables are tightly connected to the SATA port connection. The easiest way to test a cable is to replace it with another cable.

3. Out-dated or damaged driver

If your driver is out-dated or damaged, the Acer hard drive will not be detected. Therefore you should go to the Device Manager and check the driver. To update driver or reinstall the driver, you can follow the steps below.

3.1. To update driver

Access Device Manager by typing device manager in the Search Box and hit Enter. Expand the categories of Disk drivers. Find the name of your hard drive, right-click it and select Update Driver Software…. Then select Search automatically for updated driver software.

3.2. To troubleshoot driver

If the driver is damaged, there is a yellow exclamation point beside the device. Right-click on the device that has a yellow exclamation point beside it and navigate to Properties -> General -> Troubleshoot. Then follow the instructions to solve damaged driver issue.

3.3. To reinstall driver

If you cannot fix driver issue by updating or troubleshooting the drive, you can try reinstalling the driver. Uninstall drive from Device Manager, then restart PC and Windows will automatically reinstall the drivers on the hard drive for you.

Fix “Acer laptop hard drive not detected” with freeware

If the Acer laptop hard drive is damaged or there are bad sectors on it, it may cause internal hard drive not detected. You can replace the damaged disk with a good one and clone all data on the old disk to the new one with a data migration tool. Then the free partition manager named AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard is highly recommended. This freeware can work on all editions of 7/8/10/XP/Visa (both 32-bit and 64-bit). Its “Disk Clone Wizard” allows you to clone data from one disk to another quickly and easily. Besides, the new cloned disk is also bootable and you can boot Windows from it successfully then.

If your hard drive has a bad sector, you can use the “Clone Disk Quickly” method, which will not clone the bad sector. Moreover, it also provides the “Sector-by-Sector Clone” to clone each sector to the destination disk. No matter which method you finally go for, you don’t need to reinstall Windows and other programs from scratch, saving spare much time and effort.

Note:
1. The clone process will erase all data on the target disk, so please back up everything important beforehand.
2. The Standard Edition only supports MBR data disks clone, if you wish to clone MBR system disk, MBR to GPT, GPT to MBR, GPT to GPT, please upgrade to the Professional Edition.

Step 1. Install and launch AOMEI Partition Assistant, click "Clone" in the main interface and select "Clone Disk".

Step 2. Choose the hard disk that you need to clone as the source disk and click "Next".

Step 3. Select the destination disk to store the data on the source disk, and then click "Next".

Step 4. Then, you can check the source and destination disk in the next window or change to “Sector to Sector clone”, and click the "Confirm" button to continue if there is no problem.

Here, you can also click the "Settings" button to adjust the partition size on the destination disk or tick "4k alignment" to improve the reading and writing speed of SSD if the target disk is an SSD drive.

Step 5. At last, click "Apply" and "Proceed" in the main interface to start cloning the hard drive.

Then you can replace the damaged Acer laptop hard drive with the cloned good hard drive and boot from it. This free edition only supports cloning MBR-based system disk to another MBR disk, if you are planning to transfer MBR to GPT for Windows 11 , please upgrade to Professional edition.