Sandy said:
I have a 40 gig HD that came out of my old Pentium 3 Gateway Fedora
desktop.
It was originally running Windows ME and has a lot of data I want to
recover.
I installed it in a USB stand alone enclosure and hooked it to my Gateway
DX-420's USB port. Windows recognizes the drive is there. You can go to
the
right click: My Computer/Manage/Disk Manager window and see the disk info,
but the host computer didn't assign it a "drive letter". If I click on
the
line for the USB HD and the window that pops us has the 'Change/assign
drive
letter' option grayed out! I tried another 1.2 gig hard drive I had
laying
around and it works fine in the USB enclosure interface and gets a drive
letter assigned. (That old drive has Windows 98 O/S in it) Is there a
workwaround utility or procedure so that I can assign a drive letter ("K"
in
this instance!) to this USB hard drive?
I did try changing the boot up sequence so that the BIOS would look at the
USB port first for a bootup drive. The Windows ME greeting screen comes
up
and the desktop eventually appears with the XP format, but same problem:
drive not assigned a letter. Any help out there?
Nobody seems to have an answer at Iomega or Gateway.
my e-mail address is (e-mail address removed)
Sandy:
Since your primary objective at this point in time is to access data on that
40 GB HDD, why don't you do this (assuming you're knowledgeable enough to
access the "innards" of your current Gateway desktop machine)?...
Remove the HDD from its USB enclosure and install it (at least temporarily)
as an internal HDD in your desktop PC. I'm assuming it's a PATA (not a SATA)
HDD so connect it to whatever IDE channel is available. Ensure that it's
properly connected & jumpered and boot to your current boot drive. Hopefully
that secondary HDD will be detected and you'll be able to access its data.
If there's still a problem with drive recognition, it would be wise to
download the HDD diagnostic from the manufacturer of that hard drive. You
didn't indicate its make buy virtually every major manufacturer of hard
drives has a diagnostic utility available for download. It's possible that
you may be dealing with a defective disk.
We've prepared the following "troubleshooting" tips re this rather common
problem involving the non-recognition by XP of USB devices. Take a look at
it and see if there's anything there that might be of some help to you.
1. Access Disk Management and see if the USB device is listed. If so, and
there's no drive letter assigned, see if you can assign a drive letter to
the device.
2. If the USB device is listed in Disk Management with an assigned drive
letter, right-click on its listing and select Explore from the submenu.
Hopefully, Windows Explorer will open and the device will be listed.
3. Connect the USB device *directly* to a USB port on the computer, not via
a USB hub. Try different USB ports should your computer have multiple ports.
4. Avoid using a USB extension cable.
5. Try connecting a USB device (that does not contain an auxiliary power
supply) to a USB port both before and after the boot operation.
6. Where a USB (or Firewire) external HDD is involved, access Device
Manager, highlight the Disk drives listing and click on the Action menu item
and then the "Scan for hardware changes" sub-menu item. Do the same in Disk
Management > Action > Rescan disks.
7. Try alternate powering on/off methods. If the USB device contains its own
power supply, try booting up with its power on, then try powering on only
*after* the system has booted to a Desktop.
8. Try a different USB cable.
9. In the USB controllers section of Device Manager, uninstall all the USB
controllers listed and reboot.
10. If the device in question is not a commercial USB external HDD but
rather one in which you installed a HDD in a USB enclosure, jumper the HDD
as Master (or Single if the HDD is a Western Digital disk). A number of
users have reported that jumper configuration corrected their
non-recognition problem. In my own experience it didn't seem to matter how a
USB external HDD was jumpered. But it may be worth a try.
11. If the device in question is a USB external HDD, first check out the HDD
with the hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic utility. If it checks out OK,
and you can remove the HDD from its enclosure (without voiding any
applicable warranty), do so and install the HDD as an internal HDD to
determine if there are problems with the drive.
12. If the USB device is connected to a USB 2.0 PCI card, try changing the
PCI slot to which it's currently connected to another one.
13. Access the website of the manufacturer of the USB device to determine if
there's any firmware update or info re the problem you're experiencing or
there's any possibility that the USB enclosure itself might be defective.
14. Determine from the manufacturer of your motherboard whether there's a
BIOS upgrade affecting USB device recognition.
A number of posters have reported they've found useful information re
troubleshooting USB devices on this site...
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbtrouble_e.html
Anna
