Can't access hard drives after clean install of XP Pro

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Guest

I have several hard drives that have important data on them. I used to dual boot between 2000 & XP Pro, but I don't use 2000 anymore. So to get rid of 2000 and reclaim the disk space, I did a clean install of XP Pro. Now I have access to only my system drive and one of my other drives. If I go to My Computer->Manage->Disk Management, XP sees all the drives, displays their volume labels, and their status is all Online, Active & Healthy. However, only two of the drives have drive letter assignments. If I right-click on one of the unassigned drives, the Assign Drive Letter is greyed out. The only thing it allows me to do is to delete the partition or convert it to a dynamic disk. This is the case with three of my drives, all of which were put in service when I had only Win 2000. Before I reinstalled XP, all drives were accessible to both OSes.

These are physically different drives, not different partitions on one drive. The BIOS sees everything fine, and so does Disk Management, but it won't let me assign a drive letter, so I can't access anything.

For a while I used System Commander for multi-booting, and it could be that SC formatted the three drives that now are unassigned, I don't recall for sure.

Any ideas?

Any ideas? Thanks!
 
It's really hard to know what your setup is. Did you install WinXP on the
drive that formerly held Win2k and now you have
WinXp installed on two drives. What I would do is remove all the drives
except the boot drive. Then hook up each one
by itself on the secondary IDE channel as master. See if you can access it
that way.
bruceski said:
I have several hard drives that have important data on them. I used to
Click to expand...
dual boot between 2000 & XP Pro, but I don't use 2000 anymore. So to get rid
of 2000 and reclaim the disk space, I did a clean install of XP Pro. Now I
have access to only my system drive and one of my other drives. If I go to
My Computer->Manage->Disk Management, XP sees all the drives, displays their
volume labels, and their status is all Online, Active & Healthy. However,
only two of the drives have drive letter assignments. If I right-click on
one of the unassigned drives, the Assign Drive Letter is greyed out. The
only thing it allows me to do is to delete the partition or convert it to a
dynamic disk. This is the case with three of my drives, all of which were
put in service when I had only Win 2000. Before I reinstalled XP, all drives
were accessible to both OSes.
These are physically different drives, not different partitions on one
Click to expand...
drive. The BIOS sees everything fine, and so does Disk Management, but it
won't let me assign a drive letter, so I can't access anything.
For a while I used System Commander for multi-booting, and it could be
Click to expand...
that SC formatted the three drives that now are unassigned, I don't recall
for sure.
 
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