Windows will not allocate a drive number to my slave drive

[Bob Gilliland]

I am using Windows XP Home edition. I had a boot up
problem and so I went to "Go back" to choose an earlier
time when the system was working fine. While "Go back"
was copying sectors, the system shut down. I could no
longer boot up at all. I bought another hard drive, (I
wanted to use a separate drive as a back up anyway). I
installed the new hard drive, partiioned as ntfs and
installed the XP operating system. The new drive is
working fine. I need to retrieve important files from the
old drive. I set the jumpers for slave, bios sees it and
shows it as a primary slave drive. When I boot up to
windows, the old drive doesn't show up in "My Computer".
Windows XP doesn't give it a drive number. It shows up in
the device manager as a hard disk and working properly,
but not as a drive. I used the XP repair console and it
asked me if I wanted "C" Windows or "F" Windows. I
chose "F" Windows and I was able to view the directory of
my old drive that dos is calling F drive. Windows is not
seeing it and the repair console will not allow me to copy
files on the old drive to the new one. How can I get
windows XP to see this drive as a drive instead of a hard
disk storage unit. Anyone got an idea. Both drives are
partitioned as ntfs which Windows XP should be O K with..

 

[rjgil]

I should say that the old hard drive was 40Gb and the new
one is 80Gb

 

[Cari \(MS MVP\)]

Assign it a drive letter. Right click on My Computer, select Manage. On
the following screen, click on Disk Management. It should appear on the
right hand side of the screen from where you can assign a drive letter.