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Microsoft Drive Letters

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6 replies

by croderique

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I had a melt down of my home PC. It had Windows XP Pro SP2 and 3 IDE drives. When I built a new PC with a new motherboard and Windows Vista I installed a SATA main drive and tried to install the IDE drives as slaves. Either Vista or the previous meltdown caused the 3 drives to lose their drive letters and now I can see the drives in Disk Manager but with no drive letters and Explorer does not recognize them. Is there any way to assign a drive letter so I can get the info from the IDE drives without formatting them?
Thanks

6 replies

by jplconsultant

In Device Mangler (manager), right-click the drives. There should be an option to assign a drive letter.

JPL()

by anis.h

you go to disk manager and you right click on the partition and assign a drive letter.
if this didn't work you can always use a hard disk enclosure that you can connect to a usb port.

by croderique

Thanks, but I've tried both already. The right click doesn't
give the option to assign or change the drive letter, it is
grayed out.
Tried to put all three disk drives in a USB enclosure but
same thing. I know that works as I had a samll 20GB drive
and it works fine, gets a drive letter.
The drives are Seagate and I tried their disk inspection
and disk recovery and it says everything is fine. So does
Norton and Disk Manager. Just no drive letter so I can't
explore, copy or do anything.
Any other suggestions?
Thanks

by gcomfort

I have the same situation. If you have a solution, please reply.

thanks.

by irishmike

SATA drives don't need jumpers as you can set-up the master from the BIOS but the IDE drives will need a jumper put in place telling it either to be a master of slave and then the drives should appear under the Disk Manager

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