Personally, I open the case and disconnect the data cables. Then there is no chance of the drives being accessed.

As for disabling in the BIOS, you should be able to disable each individual port (ie: SATA0, SATA1, SATA2, etc.).

 

The ports appear to be grayed out in the BIOS unfortunately. There is only the ahci/ide option and it refuses to select anything below that.

 

You have 4 hard drives in a asus LAPTOP?????
Maybe partitions???

 

I'm reinstalling Windows 7 on an Asus laptop
There are four hard drives in my computer

That's impossible for ANY laptop.
Yours either has 1 hard drive divided in 4 partitions or it has 2 hard drives divided into a total of 4 partitions.

What's the complete model number of your ASUS laptop?

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Yeah, they're most likely partitions. ASUS K73S

 

That model laptop does appear to come with 1 or 2 SATA hard drives with capacities of 320 GB or 500 GB or 640 GB or 750 GB.

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That model laptop does appear to come with 1 or 2 SATA hard drives with capacities of 320 GB or 500 GB or 640 GB or 750 GB.

View attachment 255948

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There are two hard drives with 320 GB each.

 

disconnect the harddrive u want to keep the data (pull power plug or sata)
then see if u can install windows on the remaining drive..... u will lose all data on this drive

 

Wouldn't it be better to disconnect one drive at a time and see if the thing will boot. That will tell them which drive is the boot drive (unless they're in a raid configuration). Then with both drives connected transfer anything you want to keep from the boot drive to the second drive before you disconnect the second drive to load windows on the boot drive. It might also be a good idea to do this off line and rescan the second drive for viruses in Safe Mode after connecting it back before booting into Windows or going online. You might be able to do that by copying a malware installer to the second drive so you can install it from there in Safe Mode since the new install will not have any programs on it yet.