New hardrive has no drive letter

  • Thread starter Thread starter Keven J. Nielsen
  • Start date Start date
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Keven J. Nielsen

I just put a harddrive in my computer as a slave to my C: drive. It is
FAT32. C: is of course NTFS. The harddrive was previously working in this
computer but I had to remove it to install Windows Vista. Now that I put it
back in, it doesnt show up in Windows Explorer. In Disk Management it shows
up and says it is healthy but it has no drive letter and the option to
change drive letter is greyed out.

Does anyone know how to enable this disk so I can retreive the information
from it?

Thank You

Keven
 
Have you rebooted to see if it's recognized on reboot? Does the Bios
recognize a second drive?
 
Mary, unless he installed the drive with the power on, not the smartest
thing in the world to dofor either human or machine safety, Keven had to
boot. :)

In Disk Management, right click on the left side. It should presetn a menu
with the option to create a new volume. From there, just follow the bouncing
ball.

Gary G. Little
 
Thank You Gary. I did see that option but I was concerned it would
re-partition the Hard drive and I need to preserve the information on it.
Will it preserve the information if I create a new volume? Exactly what
does it do when you create a new volume?

Thank You

Keven
 
It may do what you fear ... destroy all your data, if you don't have a
backup. Several options have been discussed here on how you may be able to
recover the data. My personal choice is ShadowProtect from storagecraft.com
because once installed in Vista, ShadowProtect will let me open the saved
image as a lettered volume. However, ShadowProtect does not, as yet, fully
support Vista, which they will have "Real Soon Now".

The bottom line is that to use the disk in Vista you will have to create a
volume.
 
You could use an external hard drive USB port connection to the drive and
see if you can access it that way.
TonySper
 
Thanks for the idea. I am guessing that since this hard drive worked fine
in Windows XP with the exact same connection as now, Windows Vista probably
wants it to be an NTFS volume and since it is FAT32, Windows Vista will not
recognize it.

Does anyone know how to convert it to NTFS without losing the data on it?

Keven
 
Keven,

FAT32 is not, in itself, a problem for Vista. Vista will convert FAT32 to
NTFS without losing the data but it first has to see it.

A couple of ideas:
If you had any software on the XP that allowed 'large' hard drives that was
necessary due to your BIOS limits, that might be limiting your ability to
see the drive without that software.

If you had any file/disc restore software running on your old XP system that
might be preventing the partition from being used without that software
running. (Recent poster had Norton GoBack that was preventing him from
getting to the data from his old drive).

If you had any encryption software that was protecting the drive you will
not be able to get to the drive now.

I am butting in late on this thread so if you have already considered these
things - sorry about that.

Michael
 
Michael said:
Keven,

FAT32 is not, in itself, a problem for Vista. Vista will convert FAT32 to
NTFS without losing the data but it first has to see it.
Click to expand...

Vista works fine with existing FAT32 drives. It just won't format
FAT32.

Mike
 
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