Why Windows XP will not let me access a FAT32 drive?

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Guest

A customer of ours was using a computer with Windows ME on it and got one
with Windows XP to replace it. To make sure I didn't miss any of his data I
just wanted to stick his old drive into the new PC and dump entire contents
of it to the new drive. The new PC, however, while seeing the old drive fine
and recognizing that it was a FAT32 one simply wouldn't give it a drive
letter, and the option to do so was grayed out. So I finally took both
drives, drove them back to our office, stuck them both into a PC running
Windows 2000 and copied the data that way. Is this one of those idiotic XP
security measures or did I need to do something extra to make it work?
 
XP has no inherent problems reading FAT32 drives and these is no security
issue involved. There is sometimes a problem accessing older drives using a
USB to IDE adaptor. How was the drive connected? IDE? slave/secondary
master? Are you certain it was jumpered correctly? Was it Computer Manager
/. Disk Management that had the grayed out option?
 
ntsf won't read a fat32 drive.
Click to expand...


No, this isn't at all correct. First, it's not one file system that can or
can not read another; it's rather the operating system that has the
capability of reading file types. And Windows XP can read and use NTFS,
FAT32, FAT16, and FAT12, in any and all combinations--separately or
together-- and regardless of what file system it itself is installed on.
 
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