Okay so, a few weeks ago I started whining here on trying to figure out what was wrong with my disk, turns out the partition tables are screwed and I couldn't do anything to fix it (btw, thanks to all those who tried to help). My only other option was to backup using a disk recovery program, blow it all away and restore. The problem was that parts of my computer were still down, fauty PSU, video card still unrepaired and no access online with the PC.

Now that I've got it all up and running again, I was going to do just that. Unfortunately the OS wont see the portable HDD I'm going to back up to because it's unformatted. Now here is the problem, when I go into Administrative settings -> Computer Management, I can't see any disks to manage in order to format this disk.

I have no idea what caused this, what is wrong and how to fix it. Any ideas?

Is the Logical Disk Manager Service running? If not make sure it's set to auto start.

Weird, that you see nothing.

I have never liked this Windows tool, and I use a PE recovery disk running Paragon Hard Disk Manager and other types of related tools like A43 file manager.

How would I go about editing the poperties of the Logical Disk Manager service? Also, I'll grab that Paragon Hard Disk manager you reccomend, however, I'm slightly worried that this problem may effect something deeper than just this display.

Your whole Computer Management MMC snapin is missing a lot of stuff. You should have sub-items under every one of those options. It should look like:

-System Tools

--Event Viewer

--Shared Folders

--Local Users and Computers

--Performance Logs and Alerts

--Device Manager

-Storage

--Removable Storage

--Diskeeper

--Disk Management <---what you're looking for

-Services and Applications

--Services

--WMI Control

--Indexing Service

Try running diskmgmt.msc to see what you get. That's the Disk Management snapin by itself.

That worked fine, I can see all the disks now via that method. Thanks Memnoch.

My guess is then that the MMC is missing some calls or pointers to these things. Is there anything I can do about that? Is it worth it (could it cause some problems in the future) or can I just leave it be as it isn't much of an issue?

Well I would investigate why it happened.

(following up old topics I've started out of courtesy)

Well I couldn't solve the specific issues I'm having and reinstalled. Everything works fine now. If anyone has anything to add on these issues later on, feel free to add the info here for reference.