Laptops

Is not accessible probably because the Safely Remove Option in XP is not being used.

What happens is that the Partition Information gets erased when you do not use the Safely Remove Option so the Drive/Partition is inaccessible. What you need to do is open Drive Managements look for this drive and see how it is being reported. It will most likely want you to format the drive to make us usable again. If you need to recover Data you need to use some kind of Data Recovery Software or send the drive off to a Data Recovery House to have it recovered.

If you wish to use some form of Data Recovery There are a whole lot of different programs available
Here is a short list of the better ones

http://tinyurl.com/273ay5

http://tinyurl.com/rmvrv

http://tinyurl.com/yvrsl

http://tinyurl.com/yyk8cm

http://tinyurl.com/382vm

http://tinyurl.com/ynwnel

http://tinyurl.com/nc4kx

http://tinyurl.com/2wox7l

http://tinyurl.com/374d8b

http://tinyurl.com/djw6u

http://tinyurl.com/f73se

http://tinyurl.com/8bd3f

http://tinyurl.com/afu2j

While the last 2 are from the same company they are very different products. Win Hex should only be considered foe use by someone who knows Hex Inside Out while Davory is a great cheap General Purpose Application.

Personally I prefer the On Track Option but it's anything but cheap. However because I use this type of software a lot it's paid for itself many times over by now, for a cheaper option Spin Rite from Gibson Research or Stella have both very good reputations by other TR members.

Col

WARNING!!!!
Any changes you make in the registry could make the computer unstable or UN-operable.
...........................................

Delete Usb Drive Letter via Registry to Remove Conflict .

In Windows operating system especially Windows XP, when plug in external USB or FireWire mass storage device such as USB key, flash drive, portable harddrive, the drive is not been assigned a drive letter by the system, hence the USB drive or FireWire drive is not showing in Explorer and no AutoPlay or AutoRun window pops up, although the device has been detected, in Safely Remove Hardware (show device but with no drive letter) wizard. The cause is probably due to ?stupid? behavior of XP where it won?t find an available letter from the free letters pool when the USB or FireWire external drive which has previously mounted and assigned a drive letter is been inserted to computer USB or FireWire port again, but that previously allocated drive letter has been taken up and used by another storage devices. Another possible reason is all 26 letters in alphabet has been used, but this situation is rare and unlikely.

There is a solution to USB or FireWire drive not showing in system error. However, the disconnect conflicted storage device to free up the drive letter fix may not be practicable or usable by some, such as computers which are on a network or system running data transfer activity to all its drive assignments continuously flow without stopping, and thus disconnect or reassigning any mapped drives, networked drives, removable drives or other storage drives is not an option.
In this situation, there is another workaround hack to fix the no USB or FireWire drive issue. The workaround fix relies on the registry tweak below to change the drive letter that has been previously assigned to the mounted USB or FireWire portable mobile flash or hard disk drive. Or if users wish, can opt to delete any reference to the detected drives by the device so that when the storage device is plugged in again, the whole drive letter assignment will be start from fresh, and clean.
1.Login to Windows as an Administrator.
2.Open Registry Editor by typing regedit (or regedt32.exe in older Windows prior to XP) in Run command of Start Menu and then press Enter.
3.Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices
4.Optional step which not required in Windows XP or later, right click on MountedDevices, then select Permissions. You can also click Permissions from the Security menu.
5.Optional step which not required in Windows XP or later, check the option to make sure that Administrators have full control to the registry key. Change and revert back this setting when you are finished with the reset of the steps.

6.If you run above 2 steps in OS earlier than Windows XP, quit regedt32.exe and run regedit.exe.
7.Also in the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices registry branch selected, in the right pane, find and locate a registry value which represents the troubled USB or FireWire drive. The registry key should have the name that resembles the format of \DosDevice\X: where X can be any alphabet letter which corresponding to your physical system drive letter.

Here?s a guidelines that you can follow to quickly determine which registry key is linked to your conflicted drive letter:
Exclude \DosDevice\A: and \DosDevice\B: which normally reserved for floppy disk drives.
Exclude \DosDevice\C: which normally is the system root drive.
If you have more than one fixed hard disk drives, then any drive letters that are using by them is not possible linked again, UNLESS the additional hard disk drive is added AFTER you first use the USB or FireWire device that now unable to show.
Same case with CD-ROM or DVD-ROM optical drive as above reasoning.
If you have inserted and mounted a lot of thumbdrives, USB flask drive, or external hard disks before, you will likely still see a lot of remaining registry values that you won?t know which is which. In this case, double click on each remaining registry key values to view its binary data. Inside the binary data, there will be trace of the name of the device that this registry key represents.
Also you might need to make sure that in your USB section of the bios that the "Legacy" option is marked "Enable".

Please post back if you have any more problems or questions.