External hard drive does not show drive letter but shows as healthy 1

[michaelh613]

I have a hard drive taken from a computer that crashed. I have installed it in an external hard drive enclosure from dynex. When I install it the hard drive shows up as healthy (NTFS partition) in both device manager and computer management. However it does not show up with a drive letter. I cannot assign it a drive letter in computer management or in map drive letter. I need to be able to access the data on this hard drive.

Thank you for any help

 

[wolluf]

Have you tried connecting it directly to the machine?

Worth looking at getdataback (evaluation mode) to see if it can access the drive & possibly recover data.

 

[michaelh613]

I'm not familiar with a getdataback. I will admit the reason I bought the hd enclosure was so I wouldn't have to take apart a good machine to install a slave drive.

What would a getdataback be.

 

[wahnula]

http://www.runtime.org

It has an excellent success record on this forum.

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[wolluf]

you can usually connect a second or slave drive temporarily just by taking side off - doesn't have to be 'installed', just connected to power and ide or sata connector.

 

[G0AOZ]

You could probably have the drive installed in your USB external enclosure and G-D-B may still see it...

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[michaelh613]

Still having this issue. Just tried making it a slave to another drive in a machine rather than use a external enclosure and still getting the problem where it is health and active but cannot be assigned a drive letter

 

[Prydonian]

Make sure that the system drive is configured as "Master with Slave" and not as "Master, Single Drive". I've been caught by this more than once and the result, if it boots at all, is as you describe.

Mike, The IT Guy.

Life is too short to drink warm beer....

 

[G0AOZ]

wolluf, wahnula and myself have all suggested you try GetDataBack. Have you done so yet? If the partition table on this drive is scrambled, then this is exactly what you'd expect to see, i.e. healthy drive but no letter allocated.

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[btbenev]

It is possible that the drive is partitioned, but not formatted or initialized and not partitioned, so it would show you a drive, or a part of a drive that is healthy, but cannot be utilized. can you see the file system type of the drive you are trying to access?

 

[btbenev]

sorry, I didn't read enough I suppose. you can see the file system type... yeah, try a data recovery app...

*nothing to add* sorry

 

[michaelh613]

I did resolve it using a data recovery software. I don't know what get data back is but used a different one designed for this type of problem which allowed me to create a drive letter. Thanks for everyones help

 

[janat5]

Hi. I am having this problem. XP home & my motherboard blew. I have now changed motherboard and had to reinstall XP on C: drive with D: installed again as slave. In Disk Management I can see the D: drive but it has no volume label, no file system and shows 100% free. It is actually NTFS formatted as is the C: drive. What did you use, please, Michaelh - and did you manage to keep folders and filenames?

I found testdisk-6.9.win which can recover files in this case, but without names or folders - and there is way too much on the drive for that! (It would probably be excellent on a memory card for photos)

 

[michaelh613]

I used this software

http://findandmount.com/download/