Formatted Maxtor Hard Drive Letter Unnassigned

[anxiousm]

I have just installed a new mother board and chip to speed up my ailing PC.
I had a slave drive, Maxtor 4K040H2 40GB which had all my back ups on it (it was partitioned 30:10) prior to replacing the motherboard. All was fine before the new motherboard entered the case.
Unfortunately, feeling rather proud that I had backed up my data, my PC through its new motherboard recognises the drive (it is shown in the device manager) but cannot read from the drive as no drive letter(s) is assigned to it and I cannot assign a letter to it.
The disc is formatted.
I have had a root around using disk manager and here are some of what happens (or doesn't happen as the case may be).
If I go to 'Administrative Tools', the drive appears with no name in the volume and no drive assigned. It tells me the drive is FAT32 with a capacity of 27GB or so (so it sounds like the PC can see the 30GB partition) and that 42% of the drive is available (which is also about right - I had used 15GB or so).
So it looks like the PC sees the drive and one of the partitions but still no drive letter.
When I right click on the drive, all options (except 'delete partition' (it only shows the larger partiions) and 'Help' are greyed - this troubles me as I should be able to use Disk Management to format the disk if nothing else (not that I want to given my date!)
Currently then my smugness at having made a backup is all to nought! Can anyone help?
I am running Win XP Home 2600, AMD-xp 1900, 256MB on a Abit KX7-333.
Many many thanks!

 

[wolluf]

There have been a number of posts about problems reading slave disks from XP which were formatted using a previous operating system - could try searching the forum.

One thing I'd suggest is disconnecting slave drive, boot up PC so XP sees just one drive, power down, reconnect it and power up again. Now, when it loads, XP will 'find' the new drive - it may properly recognise it this time (this has worked for me).

 

[aces0]

anxiousm said:>I had a slave drive, Maxtor 4K040H2 40GB which had all my back ups on it (it was partitioned 30:10) prior to replacing the motherboard. All was fine before the new motherboard entered the case.<

whoa! stop there now is the bios setup for another hardrive as a slave? you haven't said that, and that is why i am asking because it is a NEW motherboard..