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WinXP reinstall: Now can't access secondary HD. Can't assign drive letter.

M

MrCoyote

Golden Member
I have (3) IDE HD's, drive letters C,D,E, and three CDROM's, F,G,H.

Last night I swaped a cdrom drive around to a different position on the IDE cable and then reconfigured master/slave. I then reinstalled WinXP and now I can't access my (E) drive. In "Computer Management", the drive shows up, and the partition is shown. But there is no drive letter assigned, so I can't access it. The only option is to delete the partition. How do I go about re-initializing this drive, so I can access it?
 
It does not say unpartitioned. Just "Disk 3" or something like that. I'm not at my computer right now.
The color code for the hard drive in Disk Management is blue, so the partition is still there. I did not delete it. This is the second time, this has happened to me after switching drives around and reinstalling WinXP. The drive is an Extended Partition with the logical drive (E). But for some reason, the drive letter doesn't show up so I can't access it.

I've tried disconnecting the drive, booting, then turn off and reconnect drive. WinXP see the drive, but can't access it. I need some type of hard drive repair program to reinitialize the drive, while retaining the data. Is there some type of "signature" that XP writes to the disk in order to recognize it?
 
Have you tried right clicking on the drive in disk manager and clicking on "Change drive letter and paths ....", and then, click on "Add" to add a drive letter?
 
I fixed my problem with a small DOS program called TestDisk. It showed that the partition was in a deleted state, so I reactivated it.

This is what I think happened...
My mainboard (Asus K8V SE Deluxe) has two IDE controllers, VIA and Promise. The Promise controller is not detected when you first install XP, because it needs a seperate driver installed. This causes XP to assign my first two hard drives on the VIA controller to (C,D) and my cdrom drives to E,F,G. (My hard drive that got messed up was on the promise controller). So when I installed the Promise driver for my (E) drive, that's when I lost it. WinXP had already assigned my CDROM to drive E, so it didn't know what to do with my hard drive that has a logical drive of E. So it deactivated the partition on my hard drive.

So next time I have to reinstall XP, I need to remember what drive letters are assigned to all my drives on the Promise controller. Then, before installing the driver for this controller, make sure the drive letter is available.
 
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