could this cause issues so late though? i havent changed my disk settings since the 2 years ive gotten this laptop, and nothing ever happened until recently
It can if IRST was added recently or by accident and nothing is present for IRST to see and IRST isn't configured correctly. That does not mean this is the specific problem but you have some loose ends dangling there that should be dealt with. It wouldn't hurt to check your BIOS and see if it is set for RAID or for AHCI.
Reading Disk Manager: You have two hidden partitions. They don't look to be on that drive so what we need to determine is where they are.
Go to your Windows Start bar and in the search area type Command Prompt. Open Command Prompt. At the prompt type the following >>
wmic volume list brief. Only type in what I have put here in green (no punctuation). Hit enter, and read what it says. Take a screen shot and show me what you have there. I know you don't want to do any fancy stuff so all I want to do is see if the PC sees the other drive at all. However . . .
I may need to get you later to List Disk so instead of getting anxious about it we'll just take baby steps to see why your second SSD won't show up.
In the future you may wish to consider some software like MiniTool Partition Wizard as this program will show you everything, hidden and otherwise, but for the moment we'll do this. As soon as you take your screen shot share it here.
You have asked what RAID is and there are countless videos and web pages that will explain it to you. Essentially it is a means of combining two or more hard drives to work together as one. BUT. . . There are many kinds of RAID and if it isn't configured correctly all sorts of wild hard drive errors can occur. What you have looks to be a failing hard drive but we need to be sure if that is the case. If it is merely a misconfiguration the problem can be easily remedied. But first we need to determine what we're working with here. There is no point to having RAID controllers if you are not using RAID.
One more thing: Check your connections to the drive. Sometimes they can get jarred loose, especially with mobile units.
I look forward to your reply.
