No Letter Assigned To 2nd Hard Drive. HELP!

[Steve]

It appears that I really screwed up. My computer froze
and crashed and was acting retarded. I went to repair XP
but reformatted the partition and had to do a clean
reinstall. That was done, but now my computer sorta won't
recognize by 2nd hard drive that has all my back-up on it.

It shows up in "computer management" and says the HD is
active and healthy, but it doesn't have a letter assigned
to it.
I went and tried to assign a letter through windows and
the "assign letter" menu was grayed out for that drive.

I tried to do it through command and it showed the drive
as volume 2. I went to assign a letter to it and was told
it is not a valid volume or is not active and wouldn't
let me do it.

I uninstalled the driver and rebooted and was told new
hardware has been found, but when I went to "my computer'
it wasn't there. I went back to computer management and
it showed the drive again and said active and healthy
again, but it didn't assign it a drive letter. Once again
when I tried to assign it was grayed out.

Any ideas?

 

[John Techmeier]

I had the same issue and was waiting for someone to
respond to your message. Since that didn't happen I kept
poking around and have now solved my issue.

First, some background. I was running Windows 98se and
decided to "upgrade" to XP. I copied ALL of my files from
my C: drive to my D: drive while still running 98se. I
then did a scratch install of XP onto my C: drive. After
reloading several applications I decided that I needed to
get some of my files from my "backup." I didn't have a
drive letter for it, as you are reporting.

I rebooted my machine using the "backup" drive as the
master and the XP drive unconnected. I then proceeded to
uninstall several applications from my 98se install,
including Norton Systemwork 2002, and Roxio GoBack.

After uninstalling those, and a bunch of other
applications, I shutdown and reconnected the XP drive as
the Master and the 98se drive as the Slave. Upon reboot,
the Slave drive was recognized and assigned a drive
letter.

I'm guessing it had to do with GoBack but can't verify
that. Hope this helps.