Ext'l hard drive - no drive letter/letters

[schubie]

ChrisXPPro - I have exactly the same problem.  My eternal HD is a WD2000.  The PC quite and I thought I could access the data through the use of a IDE to USB 2.0 adapter but no luck. Have you had any luck assigning a drive letter?

[ChrisXPPro]

Sad to say - I pretty much gave up.  No luck on main HP workstation or my Lenovo backup machine.

My external is a CompUSA deal and I can explore drives going back years - just these two that won't behave!

I do wonder still whether having originally partitioned them with Partition magic 7 - whether somehow this has a bearing on things.

Is your drive partitioned?  If so - by what process/software?

I am SOL tho anyways with mine and have had to all but accept I cannot get to the last bit of data i wanted.

[schubie]

Yes my WD2000 is partitioned but I did not do it (it was done by the box builder and they are out of business).  I am sure the the original PC motherboard is shot; checked the power supply with a PS tester and it checks good.  My newest machine uses SATA drives with no IDE connection.  My gaming PC uses IDE drives.  A thought - the broken machine has a Rocket 100 card in it to extend the number if IDE drives.  I think I might try putting it into one of the other machines with the WD2000 in Cable Select.  If that fails I could try disconnecting the IDE drives in my gaming PC and connecting the WD2000 in their place.  But since the motherboard and all of the other cards are different than the broken PC I think the drive will not be happy and might not boot up.  I'll let you know what happens either way.  I hate to pay someone to get the data off but there are pictures and things that I can't replace.  I know backup, backup, backup - next time for sure! I was told that if I had a Mac I could get the data off easily decause the Mac does not use drive letters - don't knopw if that's true, but I don't own a Mac. 

[ChrisXPPro]

Your plan might work - worth a try at least.  Might also be worth seeing if you can ''plug in'' on someone else's puter and access data ... and copy off that to an external - something i have yet to try when I get the chance.

I recently added another external enclosure for future use - my original is IDE but got a docking station for SATA drives - just in case.  Got that from Newegg ..

17-153-066  EXT ENCL THERMALTAKE | N0028USU R  1  $38.99

Good luck.

[patio]

Have you borrowed another external enclosure and tried it ? ?
I would do this after physically un-installing the card reader and doing a few cold boots first...

[latham187]

Hey All,

I've read everyones comments as I have experienced the sameissue tonight.  Here's my story...
1) I plugged USB external "notebook" hard drive (WD 400) into a Dell Dimension 3000 desktop.  XP automatically installed drivers and assigned a drive letter.
2) Did a backup of some files (copy & paste). 
3) Inserted Windows XP OEM disk.
4) Restarted Computer.
5) Booted from Windows disk.
6) Deleted all partitions from my IDE disk drive, formatted and installed Windows XP.

When the new install of Windows XP finished I noticed my USB HD did not have a letter assigned to it so I went to disk management, noticed it was there without a letter assigned.  I've done everything listed in this thread without success.  Tried another HD in the external enclosure, no problems.  Tried the faulty HD in another computer, same issue.  It's not looking good.  I've declared this an issue with the HD.  Just wanted to let you know I feel your pain...

PS - No partition magic was ever used on this HD.

[patio]

Hey All,

I've read everyones comments as I have experienced the sameissue tonight.  Here's my story...
1) I plugged USB external "notebook" hard drive (WD 400) into a Dell Dimension 3000 desktop.  XP automatically installed drivers and assigned a drive letter.
2) Did a backup of some files (copy & paste). 
3) Inserted Windows XP OEM disk.
4) Restarted Computer.
5) Booted from Windows disk.
6) Deleted all partitions from my IDE disk drive, formatted and installed Windows XP.

When the new install of Windows XP finished I noticed my USB HD did not have a letter assigned to it so I went to disk management, noticed it was there without a letter assigned.  I've done everything listed in this thread without success.  Tried another HD in the external enclosure, no problems.  Tried the faulty HD in another computer, same issue.  It's not looking good.  I've declared this an issue with the HD.  Just wanted to let you know I feel your pain...

PS - No partition magic was ever used on this HD.

Start a new Topic with your info so it can recieve the proper attention...

[latham187]

I decided to use this drive as a replacement in another laptop for a family member whos hard drive died.  As I started to format this drive I had an idea but realized it was too late...


Can you boot from Windows (XP) cd and see the HD?  I noticed mine showed as "unpartitioned disk space" without a letter associated.  Maybe is you pressed "c" on the drive and created a partition here (DO NOT FORMAT)and then exit, you would be able to see it in Windows after you reboot.

Just a thought...

[schubie]

:  I was unable to read the drive anywhere.  Decided to see if the motherboard was actually bad.  Removed all of the cards and the memory, cleaned the connectors, reinstalled the cards and memory and it still did not work.  As I was pushing on the cards to ensure they were fully seated I pushed on the CMOS battery and the system came to life.  My problem along was a bad CR2032.  I replaced the battery, installed the partitioned WD2000 and all is well.  I purchased a Seagate FreeAgent USB 2.0 1TB external drive and quickly copied all of the files off the WD2000 (just in case).   

I guess I should have checked the battery first but never though of it - nor did any of the IT folks I work with.

Just wanted to close the loop and tell you what worked for me.

[Saviour]

Sometimes the simplest problems are the hardest to diagnose...

[hyang6808]

OK folks - here's the skinny!

truenorth - diskpart sure looks mega useful - and I was careful. 

I seemed to be OK to show what, on the Lenovo was seen as disk 1 (I had it set up as slave internal) .... and then did a ''list partition'' ..... that came up as just partition 1, no list of more than this.  Fine so far but ... (always a ''but''!) ....... while this appeared active a request for ''assign'' came up with a message something like ''no volume present'', or similar!!  No amount of tries yielded me any further advance from this stage.

Not sure if this is too late. I was having exactly the same problem. Reading further into the diskpart documentation, I believe what you are missing on the disk is the volume definition. Please take a look at the command 'create volume simple' and 'convert dynamic/basic'. It might work. I cannot try because I've only got vista home edition on my laptop.

Good luck!

hyang6808

[ChrisXPPro]

Hyang - never too late!  This has just been sitting on the back burner.

Appreciate your reply and suggestion - I will investigate that and see when time if it gets anywhere - and if it does I'll of course report back.

Thx again.

[hyang6808]

OK. I've got mine working. I found something called PTDD Partition Table Doctor, which could fix broken file systems. The demo is free for checking any errors. When I downloaded and ran the demo, it somehow didn't report any error, which got me disappointed. But I noticed something new there. It labeled my disk's file system as ext2/ext3, which is used by linux (I got this disk from my broken landisk). Then I downloaded ubuntu, burned a bootable CD (follow the instructions on the web, use the tools listed there).

When I booted from CD drive (choose first option: try without changing anything on harddisk), it started ubuntu and immediately mounted this disk, together with the original windows disks. Then I can view/copy all the files.

I had another look at your screen shot. Your disk 8 does have NTFS marked, which seems to mean a different problem (mine doesn't have file system marked under windows disk manager). However, it's still worth a try with ubuntu. The only cost is a CD-R.

Good luck!

hyang

[ChrisXPPro]

Thx again - something else to consider which I'll try when I can get to it.

[CactusEucaliptus]

Hello Chris,

For several months I've been using HD Segate (ATA) which installed in the external case. The case is connected to Dell laptop USB port. I took _the very same_ hard disk and very same laptop and I tried to connect the HD with one (S)ATA/IDE to USB adapter with additional power supply (and stuff). And what happend... I cannot see the drive letter! So I put the drive again to the case and - the drive letter is there!

The problem hides somewhere within the ATA/IDE to USB adapter?