How to get Windows to recognize this mSATA SSD?

I have a mSATA SSD that I was using in a Win 7 laptop as additional storage (not as a cache). I recently installed Win 10 on that laptop and the mSATA SSD is not recognized inside Windows (only in BIOS).

The most recent driver I can find for it is from 2014, and it makes no reference of Windows 10 because it predates Win 10. So I figured that without a Win 10 driver, this SSD may not work in the laptop (I may be wrong about this!), so I swapped it into a desktop running Win 7.

But it doesn't show in Device Mgr or Disk Management. It is listed in the BIOS, and the only place it's recognized in Windows is in Intel Rapid Storage Technology app, as follows:



The BIOS disk controller setting is in AHCI mode. I'd like to get access to this mSATA SSD to retrieve files off it and use it as supplementary storage. Is there any way to get access to this mSATA SSD that doesn't risk the PC not booting or having to reinstall Windows?

That's odd. It shouldn't need any specific driver besides what comes with Win10. Was the SATA controller always set to AHCI, or was it previously set to RAID or ($DEITY forbid) IDE mode?

If your main concern is getting files off of it, a USB-mSATA adapter would probably work. Alternately you could try booting from a Linux live distro (e.g., the Ubuntu Installer) and copy the data over using it.

put a bootable linux on a flash drive will likely see the drive and allow you to pull anything off of it.. it's possible the MBR is messed up and windows is refusing the recognize the drive. but usually those small msata ssd's in laptops were just recovery partitions and not really used for storage which may be another reason why windows isn't seeing it.

BlueLineSwinger said:

That's odd. It shouldn't need any specific driver besides what comes with Win10. Was the SATA controller always set to AHCI, or was it previously set to RAID or ($DEITY forbid) IDE mode?

Click to expand...

I was using it on my Win 7 laptop as an additional storage disk, and the laptop was in AHCI mode. Once I installed Win 10, that's when the disk wasn't available in Windows. So I moved it to Win 7 desktop, also in AHCI mode, and IRST app shows Incompatible as pictured above. Strange.

BlueLineSwinger said:

If your main concern is getting files off of it, a USB-mSATA adapter would probably work. Alternately you could try booting from a Linux live distro (e.g., the Ubuntu Installer) and copy the data over using it.

Click to expand...

Good call, thanks. Booted into a live distro, copied the files I needed. Then used GParted to delete partition, create MBR table, partition as NTFS. Popped disk back into Win 10 laptop and it shows up fine (so no special driver needed) and is now just another storage disk, which is exactly what I wanted, thanks.