Cannot find Windows drive

[Lars Eighner]

A lightning-related surge zapped the motherboard of my old SYX, but my 
whole life was in its hard drives (which were mirrors of each other except 
for fstab, so that either could be booted). So, I got something called an 
HP 8000 dual core tower refurbished by Joy Systems. It was supposed to 
come with Windows 7 biz on a 1 Tb drive -- and the drive is in there. So I 
installed my 2 1-Tb drives in its internal stack, having plenty of power 
and SATA plugs. I left the supposed Windows drive alone.

I was concerned about how I would get to the FreeBSD drives if it booted 
in Windows, which is what I expected. But low and behold, it booted into 
FreeBSD. The old drives had 10.x AMD kernels and worlds, and they took 
off. I could boot to one or the other. But I cannot find the Windows 
drive. It does not seem to show up in /dev. And when I go to the BIOS set 
up, the BIOS does not seem to know of the existence of the Windows drives 
either. I checked that all of the SATAs are not hidden.

bsdinstall only gives me a choice of the two known BSD drives -- I thought 
I could adjust the MBR to include Windows, but bsdinstall denies all 
knowledge of the third (original to the machine) drive. I tried to get 
into the Intel BIOS Management, but it wants a password -- I have no idea 
what. I suppose I should be happy to have my data back. But the missing 
drive is preying on my mind.

What happened?

-- 
Lars Eighner
luvbeastie at larseighner.com