Hard Drives not found - SOLVED.

[Caring1]

A bit of back ground first, I was given a recently new Lenovo laptop to fix that sounded like a typical hard drive failure, but the drive was already replaced once due to a similar issue.
All checks on the W.D. Blue drive came up good and it appeared the boot sector was corrupt, but all attempts to repair it failed and the drive would not show up in Disk Management when connected to another system.
I bought a new W.D. Black drive and tried to do a clean install, but now the new drive isn't found either.
I've been scratching my head over this for two days and am probably missing something simple, but I'm close to pulling my hair out and need help.
Any suggestions, ideas are welcome and appreciated, I know TPU has smarter people than me that do this for a living, help?
Edit, just a bit more info.... Both disks show in Disk Management on another system but do not show during the Windows install process on the laptop.

 

[Deleted member 24505]

Try a different drive, see if it rejects all drives. Test the drives in another machine, if they work in another machine, and not in the laptop, then the laptop is fubar.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Lenovo have whitelists, i.e. only official hardware works. If whatever you stick into your notebook isn't on that whitelist, it won't work, be it Wi-Fi card or something else. I did however not think they did this with drives...

 

[dorsetknob]

Related read regarding whitelist's and lenevo
http://www.sbbala.com/DellWWAN/Whitelist.htm

 

[TheLostSwede]

It's some seriously annoying horse shit. In fact, it should be illegal.

 

[Caring1]

Just to update, I have tried four Hard Drives and none are seen by the laptop during Windows installation, so I've ordered an adapter to put a Hard Drive in the Optical Bay and see if that works instead, I will update again once I have it and try it out.

 

[dorsetknob]

so I've ordered an adapter to put a Hard Drive in the Optical Bay and see if that works instead,

Your still probably going to fall victim to "The White List" but lets hope you Don't

 

[Caring1]

Just to update, I finally managed to get the new Hard Drive seen by the laptop and installed W10 on it and all is functioning as it should.
It seems problems arose when I formatted the drive as GPT, then tried MBR as well after it wasn't seen, and then trying to remove partitions and changing it to Dynamic etc, in the end I deleted all partitions, and it worked.
It was a lot of stuffing around that shouldn't have happened if the drive was seen when first installed.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Right, if you do GPT, you need to create a different USB boot drive for Windows 10. It's a real pita. Had you mentioned that...

This should help http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-create-a-bootable-uefi-usb-drive-with-windows-10-setup/

 

[Caring1]

Right, if you do GPT, you need to create a different USB boot drive for Windows 10. It's a real pita. Had you mentioned that...

This should help http://winaero.com/blog/how-to-create-a-bootable-uefi-usb-drive-with-windows-10-setup/

I used Rufus to set the USB drive up as GPT bootable, but had issues with the new hard drive not being seen to begin with.