Missing Drive Letter in MyComputer 1

[FXP]

I put a 40Gig hard drive in an external case and plan to use it to back up my laptop. The laptop is an IBM R30 running Windows 2000. Plug and Play found the USB external drive fine and "System' says it is enabled and working fine. The drive is on and spinning. The problem is Plug & Play did not add a new letter drive to MyComputer so I can't address it. The only drives I have is C and D, a DVD drive. The drive is configured for a Master per instructions and since I've done this with other external USB drives it should work. I rebooted several times.

Can anyone offer any suggestions as what to do next?

 

[Freestone]

Start, Run, diskmgmt.msc

Does the drive show up there? Was/is the drive formatted?

 

[FXP]

The drive does not show up when I run diskmgmt.msc. The drive is one I pulled out of an old working machine, it was formatted and running as the C drive.

 

[Freestone]

Can you try the enclosure on another system? Can you remove the drive and add into your system as a slave?

 

[FXP]

I hooked up the external drive to my desktop and it works fine. My desktop is running Windows XP Pro. I think its safe to say it is the Windows 2000 operating system and my laptop configuration that is causing the problem.

Now why wouldn't the operating system assign a drive letter if it sees the device as a drive? Is it possible it doesn't recognize a drive and thinks it it some other device -- got me?

Thanks for the assistance.

 

[Freestone]

Windows 2000 isn't seeing it as a drive (disk management isn't seeing it) which is why it isn't being assigned a drive letter.

A real shot in the dark, but was the drive in the enclosure ever exposed to a program called GoBack?

Is the data currently on the drive important? If not, perhaps you can use XP's disk management to delete any current partitions, create a new one and format it. Then try it again on the laptop.

 

[FXP]

I don't use GoBack. I was planning to copy the old data to a new larger backup and then reformat the entire drive into one partition. I have to set this up, will keep you posted next week. Thanks for the suggestions.

 

[FXP]

You da man! I moved the external drive to my desktop running XP, partitioned it and assigned it a drive letter. I then moved the drive to my laptop running Windows 2000 and formatted it to NTSF. It's working fine now.

Thanks for your suggestions.

 

[Freestone]

I'm glad you got it working. I'm still not sure why it didn't work for you the first time unless it had something to do with the fact that it was a primary partition marked active (it was a former C: drive). Thanks for the star.