Windows Forum

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Hard Disk Drive Letter Missing

0 helpful
6 replies

by noor

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

I have 2 Hard Disks. O/s win xp HE. Installed XP on First Drive FAT32. Saved Data on 2nd HD FAT32. XP got corrupt on First Drive so I reinstalled it after repartitioning First HD in 2 and formatting it to NTFS. XP loaded without a problem. THe second Hard disk is not appearing in MY Computer.
Looking via disk management it shows Active but no drive letter. When I Right click the 'change drive letter' is
greyed out. The only options available are 'Delete partition' and 'Help'.
The HD is shown as Basic and Active.
Does anyone have any idea how to reactivate the Hard drive without losing the data? Thanks.
.

6 replies

by oz_media

Have you checked the jumper settings on the hard drive?
I don't know if it relates to your problem because I think you can see the drive but not change it. Does the data show up in explorer?

by noor

Jumper settings are okay because BIOS sees the Drive.
You are right. I can see the DRive in Disk Management but NO drive Letter. It even says it is Healthy and Active. How do I activate the Drive LEtter without losing the data?

by nettek

Try the following:

1. In Control Panel\Administrative Tools\Computer Management, click Device Manager.
2. Highlight "Disk Drives" on the right side.
3. From the Action menu, click Scan for hardware changes.

When complete:
4. Click Disk Management.
5. On the Action menu, click Rescan Disks.

If you still cannot access the disk, reboot and check if the disk is there. If necessary, repeat steps 4 and 5 after rebooting.

by noor

Thank you for your tip. It looks to me as if the drive has its MBR altered. I am going thru my software titles to see which could be the cause.

by sramesh2k

Make sure that the IDE channel Device Type is not set to None in Device Manager for the drive location of the missing drive.

1. Click START > RUN > "Devmgmt.msc" to access Device Manager.

2. Under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, double-click either Primary IDE Channel or Secondary IDE Channel, depending on where the missing drive is connected.

3. Click the Advanced Settings tab.

4. Locate either Device 0 or Device 1 (0 is the master device and 1 is the slave).

5. Check the drop down box labeled Device Type: and make sure it is set to Auto Detection instead of None.

6 .Click OK, close Device Manager, and restart the system

by laquangthong

I got the same problem. Have just spent the last 3 hours looking for a solution, yet none is available. This look like a bug in Windows for me. The only option right now: using an undelete / file recovery software to get the data from the unrecognize hard drive, then repartition / reformat ....

Window suck :-(

This discussion is closed to new replies.