Missing Drive D:

[Tom]

I have a computer that was originally WinME. It has two
physical drives, 80Gb and 120Gb, both one partition,
originally FAT32 from WinME. I installed WinXP, and it
formatted the primary drive as NTFS. Now the D: drive is
not in My Computer, etc., but it shows up in the
configuration utilities. Drive Manager sees C: as NTFS
and the second drive as FAT32, but no drive letter, and it
states "On-line(Active)". The reassign drive letter
dropdown is gray, and, when clicked, it remains "blurred
out". Can WinXP read/write to two drives with different
formatting or is this my problem (one NTFS, one FAT32)?
Help appreciated!

Tom
dembinski2(leaveout)@yahoo.com

 

[Tom]

Hi, Peter et. al.:

There is no "format & partition" choice on the drive
manager when right-clicked. On the lower screen, the
(unlettered) drive has cross-hatching through it, and the
only choice given is "delete partition". I have some data
on the drive, and I don't want to start
over/repartition/reformat until I evaluate what was on the
drive (stuff from the WinME). Again, the drive is listed
as "Healthy/Active", but no letter and no access
to "assign/change letter" box.

Tom
dembinski2(remove)@yahoo.com

 

[Emily]

I am having a similar problem Tom. I have an external hard
drive enclosure housing a 10 GB hard drive that used to
carry my operating system (windows 98). When I go to disk
management, I can see the drive has a volume called
GATEWAY and that the drive is FAT32 but when I right click
to access the drive, the only option I have is to delete
the partition. When I plug the external hard drive into my
USB port, Windows XP installs a driver. In Device manager,
the harddrive shows a driver installed that acknolwdelges
it as an removeable hard drive, but no drive letter is
assigned, and no data can be accessed. All I want to do is
pull some data off of the drive, but I can't figure out
how to get Windows XP to acknowledge the drive and allow
me to do anything other than delete the existing
partition. Any help will be great appreciated. I have
exhausted all of the Windows help manuals and have found
nothing that specifically addresses this problem.

 

[Tom]

As a last resort, you MAY be able to stuff the drive into
a unit running 98 or ME. Configure it as a slave, grab
your data, and then reformat/repartition on the existing
XP unit. I want to get THE REAL answer for this thing,
but I'm saving that as a "last resort". Hopefully,
SOMEBODY can shed a little light on this elusive topic!

Tom

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Open Device Manager (Start-Run-Devmgmt.msc) and right click on the
problem drive and uninstall it. Reboot and Windows should reinstall the
drive. Now open Disk Management (Right click My Computer, click Manage,
click Disk Management), right click on the drive, import the foreign
drive or assign it a drive letter or do whatever you can with it. If
you still can't do anything with the drive, try reinstalling your
chipset drivers and double check the BIOS settings.

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Out of curiousity, did either of you use drive compression? Any form of
encryption?