Solution to XP won't give drive letter to secondary HD 1

[RollinTech]

Hopefully others can learn from my struggle. I did a run-of-the-mill new computer setup, then hooked up the HD from the old computer via USB (love those little cable converters) to transfer My Documents, email addresses & etc.

Diskmgmt saw the drive, but XP would not assign it a drive letter. It obviously did not show up in Explorer or My Computer. Lots of trial and error and a couple of days of googling didn't find a solution. I tried mounting the drive internally instead of via USB, but that didn't help (The BIOS correctly identified the drive, though). I tried browsing it with a PE disk, no help. I tried coding a drive letter in the registry directly - no help.

WD's utility reported the old drive was failing (it took 20 minutes to boot into Windows, but once there worked fine), so I was just about to throw in the towel, when....

I read somewhere that Norton GoBack modified the MBR, and recalled that the old HD had GoBack. Here's what I did:

I mounted the old drive as the main boot drive, turned on the machine. When I got the initial GoBack splash screen, I hit the spacebar and chose to disable GoBack. I let the routine finish, then rebooted. Of course, Windows wouldn't boot normally since there was all-different hardware underneath, but I was able to boot into safe mode.

I then shut down the machine, mounted the new drive as the main boot drive, and mounted the old drive as a secondary. The BIOS identified the drive and XP discovered it immediately and assigned it a letter. Everybody lived happily ever after.

The moral of this story is to always disable or uninstall GoBack BEFORE you decommission the old machine. Otherwise, there is NO WAY you'll convince XP to properly address the old drive.

Rollintech

 

[smah]

Good to know. Thanks.

 

[scgms1]

RollinTech,

I wanted to thank you for posting this information. Worked like a charm.

My old computer died, which I knew was coming. I had a replacement that I brought home along with my old one last weekend. After screwing around with the old computer most of last Saturday(computer wouldn't start, I figured the motherboard died) I gave up on that idea and loaded all my old programs on the new one.

Next came the matter like you, of transfering data/address book, etc. from the old hard drive. I purchased a SATA/IDE USB adapter that worked pretty slick. I'd highly recommend everyone should own one of these.

Anyway in my computer the drive was not recognized, but I could see the volume in disk management, but that was all...

I did a google search and that is where I stumbled across what you had posted. I did have GoBack installed and I did things a little different than you. I booted to the USB device and then disabled GoBack. After reboooting the computer Windows recognized the drive and assigned a letter to it.

A BIG Thank You!,
Scott

 

[RollinTech]

Excellent! Glad to hear everything worked out ok.