Hard disk with no drive letter

[Mike Corbett]

I recently had the unfortunate experience of primary hard
disk failure. I use the primary for the OS and all
software. Replaced the primary and installed XP.

My secondary hard drive contains all my data. This is
recognised in BIOS, appears in Disk Management but is not
assigned a drive letter and you can't give it one as the
option to do this is greyed out - the only available
options are to delete or help.

My former system was up to XP SP1 with probably all the
upgrades installed.

I've tried all the IDE channel configurations,
troubleshooters, knowledge base, help files and can't
find the problem.

There was nothing wrong with it before?

[Jim Macklin]

My thought is that the other drive sees the new drive and OS
as a system that does not have shares assigned (might be
wrong word) and you may have password protected your files
or disk access.
You need to try to remember how you had the other system
setup, any passwords. And then hopefully, Kelly or somebody
with more experience will finish the answer.



"Mike Corbett" > wrote in message
...
| I recently had the unfortunate experience of primary hard
| disk failure. I use the primary for the OS and all
| software. Replaced the primary and installed XP.
|
| My secondary hard drive contains all my data. This is
| recognised in BIOS, appears in Disk Management but is not
| assigned a drive letter and you can't give it one as the
| option to do this is greyed out - the only available
| options are to delete or help.
|
| My former system was up to XP SP1 with probably all the
| upgrades installed.
|
| I've tried all the IDE channel configurations,
| troubleshooters, knowledge base, help files and can't
| find the problem.
|
| There was nothing wrong with it before?

[Peter Hutchison]

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003 22:48:45 -0700, "Mike Corbett"
> wrote:

>I recently had the unfortunate experience of primary hard
>disk failure. I use the primary for the OS and all
>software. Replaced the primary and installed XP.
>
>My secondary hard drive contains all my data. This is
>recognised in BIOS, appears in Disk Management but is not
>assigned a drive letter and you can't give it one as the
>option to do this is greyed out - the only available
>options are to delete or help.
>
>My former system was up to XP SP1 with probably all the
>upgrades installed.
>
>I've tried all the IDE channel configurations,
>troubleshooters, knowledge base, help files and can't
>find the problem.
>
>There was nothing wrong with it before?

Try this solution:
1. Open Disk Management.
2. On the Actions menu select Rescan
3. Make sure the disk is signed by Windows before it can use it.
4. Now try assigned a disk letter to your disk.
5. If available try using Initialise disk (this is NOT formatting a
disk).

See Help and Support - Disk Management - Disk status descriptions for
more help.

Peter Hutchison
Windows FAQ
http://www.pcguru.plus.com/winfaqs.html