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scsi drive doesn't have a drive letter

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brarnold

Technical User
Jul 9, 2004
84
It shows up in the BIOS and in disk management, but doesn't have a drive letter so I can't get to it. It has my 4 gig of music on there so I can't format it. Is there any way to get to it w/o reinstalling?

Thanks in advance!
 
>>It shows up in the BIOS and in disk management, but doesn't have a drive letter so I can't get to it.<<

sorry for asking the obvious, but did you try to assign a drive letter view disk admin tools?

what format is the drive? how big is it?

How did the music get there in the first place (from an older system?) ...

deb
 
Yea, the system had Win 98 on it. It was the d:\ (slave) and I have a ide drive for the c:\. I partitioned and reformatted the ide and put a clean copy of xp on it. I thought the scsi would automactically come up as the d:\ again. Yeas I tried to put a drive letter through disk management, but when you right click the option is grayed out. I can't repartition it because I'll loose a lot of hard napster work! It only gives me the option to make it a dynamic disk.
 
Can you access it booting from a win98 boot floppy?
 
Can you please clarify: you said "It shows up in the BIOS" but SCSI drives normally don't show up in the BIOS they show up in the list of devices when the SCSI host controller starts up. However your BIOS may be different.

What is the model of the SCSI host controller or is it on the motherboard?

&quot;Life is full of learning, and then there is wisdom&quot;
 
I havn't tried a Win98 floppy. I need to find a 98 machine and get a boot disk. It shows up in the bios, scsi host contoller, device manager, and disk management. It is detected as scsi 15. It's a vectra vl400 Pent. 3 1000 w/512 memory. I'm thinking that I needed to do the F6 foe 3rd party scsi controller during the setup, but now I'm afraid to redue it because of the XP license crap.
 
I have an external scsi media disk array with a scsi card in a pci slot on my win xp pro system as a non-system drive. I was able to install the scsi card from inside xp like ya do with any other pci card. Then I turned on my disk and did a re-fresh in computer devices and viola ...

So I'm not *NOT SURE*, but you may not need to do the load scsi drivers when you install xp unless the drive is for system stuff.

You said that the system sees your drive but you can't assign a letter, right? That goes to what someone posted earlier -- that you need to partition it.

you might try using partition magic software. It lets you do a bunch of stuff a lot easier (and probably a lot more solid) than just computer management.

Also, if it will only let you make the disk a dynamic disk, does it say it will delete the data when it does that, or is making dynamic an option?

also, just a thought - how BIG is the scsi and is it internal or external? At one point I had a a hitch with installing external drives over 120 gig -- It might have been my usb 2 enclosures, but win xp didn't recognize them beyond 120 gig.

deb
 
It's a 29160 card w/a 18 gig scsi drive. I don't want to reinstall in case Microsoft won't let me activate again. That would turn into a bigger problem. The more I think about it I don't think Win 98 boot disk will see a scsi drive??? That sure would solve my problem!
 
Do you have any other HDD's attached to the 29160? If yes, are they working?

Re-reading your 3rd post, I just noticed that the ID is set to 15. If you can, try changing the ID so that it is >1 and <7. Just a thought.

Also, the W98 boot floppy should see a scsi HDD.

&quot;Life is full of learning, and then there is wisdom&quot;
 
It's the only one on the scsi controller. I found a Win 98 machine here at work so I'll try the boot disk tonight. If it works I'l just copy the music to the c:\. Then I can repartition the scsi.
 
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