Ext'l hard drive - no drive letter/letters

[ChrisXPPro]

Hi Cactus - well in my case installation of either of my old drives into spare machine as slaves was not successful - and unfortunately the machine they operated in is toast so no way to use them in original set up.

Seeing as enclosure works great for many other old HDD's I think my prob is in the proper recognition of the drives and I have yet to try a means of giving them a volume info.

[Saviour]

Have you tried this:

Disable your 1394 connection and reboot.  See if the drive is there.  I just read somewhere that this worked with XP SP3.

Here's the link:  http://en.kioskea.net/forum/affich-21877-windows-xp-won-t-recognize-wd-ext-hard-drive

Worth a try.  Once you reboot...enable the 1394 connection.

[CactusEucaliptus]

Chris, would you please tell me which adapter are you using for connecting your external hard drives to your laptop?

[patio]

Chris, would you please tell me which adapter are you using for connecting your external hard drives to your laptop?

In his initial Post:

I already use successfully up to three external HDD's for backup etc with no problem - in fact USB anything is pretty OK - (as is the case on my Lenovo XP pro backup machine) .  However, this HP machine replaces my old custom machine which went sour recently and tho most data was backed up I have a few items I want to pull off two (partitioned) 150Gb HDD's from it.

[ChrisXPPro]

Cactus - if you meant the make of enclosure - it's a ''CompUSA" unit - quite good for price.  This one is IDE to USB 2.

I have since bought a docking station unit for SATA but not tried it - a "Thermaltake - BlacX"

[CactusEucaliptus]

and what is the exact spec. of your hard drive(s), like model number? did I understand good that your problem lies in the fact that english alphabet contains (only) 25 letters and there are no available letters for your two extra hard drives?
did you try to connect some other hard drives via that unit - like newer drives and try to "mount" them properly?
yesterday I bouth another sata/ide to usb adapter. This one is branded and guess what - the letter is attached to the disk. However, I have a lot of HDD's which I tried to mount. When I connect some (old) models the XP does not attach drive letter to them - even with the new adapter this does not work. In my opinion the solution to this problem lies in the HDD drivers and adapter itself.

[ChrisXPPro]

Most of the info you ask for is within this thread - but earlier on of course!

The drives giving problems are WD1600 ..... 160Gb.

I have spare drive letters even tho numerous partitions on local drives.  My actual externals usually come up as "P", "Q" and "R" for instance so no excuse there.

This CompUSA enclosure as I had said - will show me all but two of my many HDD's going back about 12 years!  The two that won't get accepted and shown are from back in my DX4-66 puter days.

[CactusEucaliptus]

Chris, thank you for repeating thos information. Well, I guess you have the same problem as I do. there are indeed several old HD's that do not get recognized even with the branded adapters. In my humble opinion this is the question of the drivers and MS Windows XP just does not have the proper set of drivers for those old HD's. They just do not support them and that is that. Maybe the MS support could help solve this?

[mrogero]

ChrisXPPro,

Ok, found the solution.  The problem arises with SATA drives and what I can find seems unique to them.

My drive had the same problem.  I'm not sure which of the two commands fixed the invalid drive id number, but one of the two did it.  I typed the two in succession from Diskpart

set id=0x07 override
set id=ebd0a0a2-b9e5-4433-87c0-68b6b72699c7

The codes were found on this page -
 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753840.aspx

My drive had an id of 17 previously which seems to have been the root cause somehow.  After that, the drive immediately became 'normal' and was allocated a drive number automatically.  All information was intact.

Hope this helps.

Mike Rogero
Beijing

[ChrisXPPro]

Hi Mike and welcome.

Well my two drives are straight ATA but, when I get (make!) some time I do have a few more things to try after some interesting posts on this thread.

I guess because they contain no data vital to every day and work I have not gotten to trying other approaches but I do thank all for suggestions - and will still post back as and when (if!) I get some results of note and interest.

[slinds]

That icon color is due to my ''selected'' color choice in my own (pretty much Win2k personalized) display theme - any other drive icon if selected would look the same.  Not significant.

Re that right click - here's proof!!

Just click remove partition and then you can add it again. This fix the problem. Had the same prob as you after using a disk with the new Panasonic tv. (disk was formated in the plasma) not by windows. Maybe this helps somebody else since the thread is old.

[patio]

The Topic is 4 Years old...

[truenorth]

Yes and why when the immediate preceding post before your's (patio) is 4 years old did i today (before patio's observation) have this thread appear in my "replies to your posts? That's a mystery to me.truenorth
Ignore my comment. After posting my observation slinds post came up in the thread.