Laptop Bios Doesn't See Hard Drive, Windows Will Install But OnlyBootIfDiskIsIn

[Buttfear]

I have an Hp Pavilion DV7 that is acting kind of crazy.

The Bios does not see a hard drive even though one is installed.

Windows will install on the unseen hard drive, but then in order to boot, the install disk must be in the disk drive.

Once booted all original HP partitions are visible, including Recovery.

Recovery process via F11 does not work.

Any ideas of what the problem is?

[fu3lman]

I recently had a build where the SSD wasn't being seen by the BIOS (was on a Ryzen-based system) and was almost certain that Windows installation wouldn't see it either, but to my surprise, it did and worked flawlessly, so for the issue of the BIOS not seeing the drive, I'd suspect it's just an inconsequential oddity with UEFI and Modern OS'es. You might have some luck switching access methods in your BIOS from UEFI to Legacy (or vice-versa.) I could be dead wrong.

As far as the bootup issues, the only things I could imagine would be throwing a wrench into it would be the formatting of the drive and/or how Windows is addressing it (UEFI or Legacy) and possibly how the drive is initialized/partitioned/formatted (Basic, Simple, GPT? [UEFI], and most notoriously, DYNAMIC.)

If given the option again to just delete the existing partition/MBR, make sure you're doing so ONLY to the partition that doesn't include your recovery image, and to eliminate any other variables, use NTFS on a Basic partition with MBR.

[chazus]

I'm a little weirded out by the list of drives here. Is this all one drive, or two? Why is the C drive 30gb? and a 20gb recovery?

Can you post a picture of the BIOS?

[Buttfear]

"You might have some luck switching access methods in your BIOS from UEFI to Legacy (or vice-versa.)"

I tried that, made no difference.

"I'm a little weirded out by the list of drives here. Is this all one drive, or two? Why is the C drive 30gb? and a 20gb recovery?"

The 30GB C: drive is still there if I remove the hard drive from the laptop, I assume it's a small SSD integrated into the motherboard.