No drive letter

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Trying to install a SATA hard drive that is already partitioned. OS is XP
pro. The hard drive was originally the primary but is now installed as the
secondary. Device manager see's it. In Disk Manager it shows with no drive
letter for either of the two partitions. Under properties you can not change
or assign a drive letter. Any ideas of what I am doing wrong?
Thanks Bob
 
When I right click all I get is a help option for the first partition which
is a FAT partition. For the second partition I get the regular listing of
options but only the "Delete" and help are active. This is a very
interesting problem. Will try the linj you supplied next.
Thanks Bob
 
Bob_r said:
Trying to install a SATA hard drive that is already partitioned. OS is XP
pro. The hard drive was originally the primary but is now installed as the
secondary. Device manager see's it. In Disk Manager it shows with no drive
letter for either of the two partitions. Under properties you can not change
or assign a drive letter. Any ideas of what I am doing wrong?
Thanks Bob
Click to expand...

You must format the drive before you can assign a drive letter.
 
Drive was formated as it was the original primary drive, until it developed a
bad cluster. There is a significant amount of data on the drive that I want
to recover. Wouldn't formatting it erase the data? Since the drive was
originally format and functioning there must be something blocking drive
letter assignment.
Thanks for your response.
 
Yes, formatting will erase all data. To protect yourself against
mishaps such as bad clusters, you need to back up your
important files to an independent medium regularly, e.g. once
a week.
 
Understand about backing up, nut didn't have availability. Does not change
my current problem. I have noticed that the secondary drive partion type is
listed as MBR as is disk 0. Might this be the confusion on XP not assigning
a drive letter??
Thanks Bob
 
Hi Bob_r,

Couple of question/comments, if formatted Fat32 can't you use fdisk to set
partitions to active? Don't think you need to reformat. Obvious again sorry,
but, did you change jumpers? If this was primary drive before, do you still
have an OS on it and have you tried booting from it? Also on review of your
first response it sounded like you clicked on the lower right part of the
Disk Manager window and not the drive icon in the "Volume" column in the
upper right of the window.

Sorry, I've got more questions than answers for you.

OMS
 
Hi Bob,

Is the drive still bootable in either regular mode or safe mode? Im
going to bet it isnt but if by chance it is I would recomend that you boot to
it in order to retrieve your data.

Also have you tryed reparing the install. Its possible that the bad
sector is not in a system location. If you could repair it and get back in
you may be able to save you data this way.

What about running chkdsk in recovery console? Maybe it will take care
of the bad sector for you. I have seen windows report a sector as bad when
actualy its just corupt software.

Just some ideas. Id hate to see you blow your data away without trying
a few things first.

The Woodpile
 
Drive is Seagate SATA 120gb. There is a FAT volume (this is from Dell) of
39mb, status shows "Healthy (EISA Configuration)". There is an NTFS volume
of 111.72gb and status shows "Healthy (Active). Yes it was original primary
drive with OS. It has a damaged cluster and would not boot, nor would chkdsk
from recovery console repair. Under volume column there is no drive letter
assigned nor is there a right click option to assign. The only option being
delete for the NTFS volumn. I am hooking it up to recover data files. I am
currently trying Acronis Disk Director which shows Disk to as unsupported.
Any further thoghts???
Thanks Bob
 
Nope, nope and nope. HDTune shows the bad cluster. Recovery Console did
not work, as in chkdsk, fixmbr etc. See my prior answer to OMS. I know the
data is still there but computer will not let me at it. The OS will not
assign a letter to any of the bad drives volumes. Just aggravating.
Thanks Bob
 
I feel for yah Bob. This doesnt look good. HeHe. Did you try praying over it?

I dont think your going to be able to retrieve it.

They do make those programs that can retrieve data by looking at each sector
seprately, but im not sure if it will do you much good. Plus is it worth
spending the money to find out if its even going to work.

Well have a good weekend. Hope things work out for yah.

The Woodpile
 
Bob_r said:
Nope, nope and nope. HDTune shows the bad cluster. Recovery Console did
not work, as in chkdsk, fixmbr etc. See my prior answer to OMS. I know the
data is still there but computer will not let me at it. The OS will not
assign a letter to any of the bad drives volumes. Just aggravating.
Thanks Bob
Click to expand...

I agree with your conclusion - your data is there, you just can't get at it.

Your best bet is to take an image of the drive using Drive Image or
similar. Drive Image does not require a drive letter, it will see any
drive the BIOS sees. You would probably have the same problem if you
restored the entire image to another drive, but at a minimum you should
be able to restore individual files and folders from the image to
another drive.

In your situation I would use Drive Image 7 or Ghost 9 (essentially the
same program, Symantec re-badged Drive Image when they bought
Powerquest). I would be very surprised if you could not recover almost
all your data.

Actually, I highly recommend Drive Image 7/Ghost 9 - it allows you to
schedule disk image backups while XP is running, so you can set your
system to back itself up to another drive (or a network share) regularly
with no manual intervention required.

Sunny
 
Bob_r said:
Nope, nope and nope. HDTune shows the bad cluster. Recovery Console did
not work, as in chkdsk, fixmbr etc. See my prior answer to OMS. I know the
data is still there but computer will not let me at it. The OS will not
assign a letter to any of the bad drives volumes. Just aggravating.
Thanks Bob
Click to expand...

I had problems with a failing drive showing bad clusters. Ghost would
not backup the drive because of the bad clusters. Using Spinrite 6
fixed the problems long enough for me to use Ghost to clone the drive to
a new one with no data lost. I do not know if the data on the drive is
worth the price of Spinrite, but for me it was. I have used Spinrite
since the days of DOS and it has proven it's worth several times.
 
I like the Ghost idea and I have the program. Can you selectively restore
only part of the image? What about Partition Magic, I have not checked into
that yet.
Thanks Bob
 
Another good idea! I have SpinRite but I do not know how old it is. Use to
use it alot in the old days (7 years ago).
Thanks, I'll have to dig into that also.
Bob
 
Bob_r said:
I like the Ghost idea and I have the program. Can you selectively restore
only part of the image?
Click to expand...

DI 7/Ghost 9 supports selective restore of files and folders via it's
GUI, or you can mount the disk image and use windows explorer.
What about Partition Magic, I have not checked into that yet.
Click to expand...

It's arguably best of breed for moving partitions around, but not
relevant to your current problem.

Sunny
 
Hi Bob,

This might be a long shot but do you have a friend with an SATA connection
to try your HD on?

OMS
 
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