Cannot Assign Drive Letter In Windows 7 Disk Manager
Jun 14, 2012
I was asked by a client to get data off a circa 2004 PC that has a blown Power Supply. I removed the HDD and proceeded with my usual recovery procedure using a drive adapter cable and power supply. The problem is that I can see the drive in the Win7 Disk Manager, but I can't mount the partition. Most of the time I've not had problems with Win7. It usually just recognizes the drive and assigns a letter to the active primary partition. In this case, I can see the partition, it's active and healthy, but I can't assign it a letter. In fact, all options are "greyed out" except "Delete Partition."I've also used MiniTool Partition Wizard, but without success. Partition Wizard can assign a letter to the partition, which then shows up in Windows Explorer. If you click on the drive letter, you get the "J:\ refers to a location that is unavailable ...." I can explore the partition with Partition Wizard, but I'm unable to access the files.
Here are the Hardware particulars:Old HDD: 80GB Maxtor HDD ATA, formatted with 76GB primary partition, Active, NTFS, This was the boot drive for a PC I'm using Win7 x64. The drive is connected to my machine using a SATA/IDE Combo Drive adapter connected to a USB port on my machine. It uses the standard USB to SATA Serial Bridge Driver.
I formatted and installed windows 7 64 bit in a pc which previously had windows 7 32 bit. When i booted my 1tb dynamic disk was not detected. So I went into disk management and it had listed my disk as "Foreign Disk". So i imported the foreign disk.
The drive was detected and opened. So i rebooted the pc but now the drive is still not appearing in my computer. When i go to disk management the 1tb appears but there is no drive letter assigned. When i try to assign drive letter it statest that "Specified File cannot be found"
My windows 7 installation won't assign a drive letter to disc drives and manually trying in the device manager doesn't work either. This is also the same for virtual and external drives, it doesn't assign a letter for either...
I tried the auto fix from Micro$oft but it didn't work: [URL]
790i ftw QX9650 GTX285x2 6gbRam dual ssd and raptors but doesnt run games
I had a Mac laptop that MB crashed. I had a 3rd party turn the HD into an external drive for me so that I could access the data from it. However, when trying to hook it up to my Windows 7 pc, it is not showing in Win Explorer. After reading a few posts, a lot of people are recommending reformatting or other options that I'm afraid will destroy the data. The drive is shown in my Disk Management window as "Basic", "Healthy" and "Online", just no Drive letter?
I have Win 7 home premium on an HP laptop with 4 usb ports. I have 2 Western Digital Elements 1.5 TB drives for backups. If I plug in one of the drives, Win assigns a drive letter, but if I add the second one it doesn't.
To troubleshoot, I've plugged each drive into every usb port on the laptop, and each port reads each drive alone, but if I plug in the second drive while the first is still in, it shoes up in devices but does not get a drive letter. I tried assigning a different drive letter to the device plugged in first, but Win still doesn't assign a letter to the second drive.
My C: and a couple of other partitions come up fine, but some are missing.I go into Disk Management to assign a drive letter to these parititions but I get an error."The operation failed to complete because the Disk Management console view is not up to date. Refresh the view using the Refresh Task. If the problem persists close the Disk Management console, then restart Disk Management, or restart the computer."I've tried refreshing and restarting with no luck.I went into Vista and it shows the same thing, unassigned drives and no luck assigning a letter.
So I can't change the drive letter. Do I need to use Partition Magic again? The more I keep hearing/reading "do you have a backup?" - makes me believe the tool (OS) isn't capable of handling/accessing the data properly.
My backup software's profile database is expecting to backup to H:, which was the drive letter for my external backup drive back in XP. This drive comes up in Windows 7 as K, because Windows 7 has given my four usb card reader drives the letters F,G,H,I.
Disk Management will not show these four card reader drives unless media is inserted (connected vs. disconnected). I have changed the letters for F,G,I to T,U,W, but only because I have those types of cards (SD, CF, MS)...I do not have an XD or SmartMedia card for the one dang drive I really need to change.
What are my options, other than buying the cheapest SM card I can find to make the drive visible for this task? The SmartSyncPro database has many profiles, so remapping all those to point to K would be a major hassle.
I just bought a new ASUS computer with Windows 7. I have a Macbook Pro and would like to transfer my photos and music onto my new computer. I have 2 external hard drives that work perfectly fine on my mac as well as other PCs. When I plug either of my external hard drives in they are recognized in device manager and say they are working properly but are not recognized in disk manager or under my computer...
I have an external HDD that works on any other machine I test it on, except mine. It was working and for some reason I recently needed to use it and it didn't work. It appears in device manager but not in disk management. A drive letter might not be assigned to it, I can't see it in disk management to assign a drive letter to it.
Windows 7, 32 bit, 12 partitions on 3 hdd's, Windows 7 on C:
When migrating to Windows 7 I first tried to update my Vista which I had used happily for 2 years. Installation went fine, but there were too many problems after.
So I bought a new 1 GB hdd and installed Windows 7 there from scratch. It is on a partition with drive letter C. I copied most of my old partitions to the new hdd, went fine.
When trying to delete one of the old hdd's with EASEUS Partition Master Home 4.1.1 manager software, there is one partition on it (which once before was called C, then successfully renamed to Z ) which I can't delete. I has on it the following folders:
$RECYCLE.BIN
Boot
System Volume Information (locked)
-->and files:
BOOTSECT.BAK
bootmgr
They are only 30,5 MB in size. So I resized the partition to 1 GB.
EASEUS characterizes it as Status = System, Pri/Log = Primary. Windows Disc manager characterizes it as System, Active, Primary Partition.
My question is: Can I change the drive letter from Z to B without risking the whole system to be unbootable? (and maybe never be bootable again?) When trying I just get the usual Windows warning. I would be most grateful for an answer explaning what and why or why not.
I lost my Event Viewer, and had to do a repair installation to fix it. Unfortunately, during the repair install, Windows decided to rename my second HD as the D: drive... it was K: before that. Now I cannot access any of my docs, pictures, music, or videos through the normal means... they don't show up in libraries or explorer, and apps like Restorator and Sure Thing (CD labeler) cannot find them. I think that means the paths are broken..?
It won't allow me to rename the HD back into K: (it's not listed as available). I can access the data by clicking Computer > D, and I can see the data is there, but its unusable as of now. Any ideas?
Basically what happened was I deleted the factory partitions on this laptop( HP Pavilion G6) using disk management down to two partitions and attempted to install Ubuntu on the other partition.After a horrendously failed attempt to install Ubuntu, disk management will not recognize my hard drive even though I can see it and access it through windows. I just want to re-partition it so I can set up a recovery partition.It wouldn't boot up after the failed install, saying I had no operating system, but I used a Windows 7 repair disc and now it boots up fine, but disk management doesn't show my hd or any partitions.
anyway - i just unplugged everything from my system, to install a new graphics card, and at the same time dust around it, tidy up etc. including an external hard disc which is connected full time, and is assigned, or was assigned drive F.as i had an onboard card originally, i had difficulty with the install, so had to reset the bios by removing the battery.everything works fine now, except i have a phantom cd drive in F it doesn't show in the device manager, and it isn't in disc management either.the biggest poblem is i have an external drive which has 500gig of projects, photos and video, which are all linked to adobe lightroom, premiere and after effects, and now they are all broken links, unless i can assign the drive which has now been assigned to E, back to F where it should be.
I decided to just revert to my old XP64. At first I was gonna try to dual-boot, but the fly in the ointment was all I had was an image on my external HD, which has about 100G of other stuff on it. My disc drive would not for the life of me burn an ISO image on any of my three DVD types. And the process of trying to find how to fix the drive problem and/or create just a bootable PARTITION on a HD without effecting everything else just drove me insane...which is kind of where I am now. After a week now I just have to get back to my project. lol And if that means no fancy windows 7 internet experience..while attempting a dual-boot scenerio workaround, I shrunk partition C and created a new 5G partition at the end of it. In EaseUS, I assigned it letter B and I set it to active, figuring it was to be bootable (wrong, I know). Additionally near the same time in Folder Properties, I unhid system files, folders...etc.
NOW the System drive showed as F! Then, attempting to use EasyBCD, it told me it could not find the BCD files to begin. So, naturally it had to do with that.I thought maybe it should have been B, but why would Ease US give me that letter option?After showing Easy BCD the file it seems to be OK....there. Also in Startup & Recovery it is listed in System Startup as the default system. But is it OK?Also, should it also be active. Did I inadvertently switch it by making the new partition active? What should I do to get it to boot properly. I AM planning on booting XP from a flash drive anyway, but still.
I have a new copy of windows y 64 bit ultimate. I currently use w7 64 home premium and it is on C drive and the drive is a sata 2 drive. But when I build my new system I want to install onto a new drive which is sata 6.0 and I have made a partition on that drive (letter M) for the O/S to be installed onto ( ive allowed 150Gb ).
So my question is when I build my system and am ready to install w7 can I install onto drive M on the new sata 6.0 drive?
I will unplug the old boot drive as I understand windows will boot to that if I dont unplug it, then when I have installed new O/S on the new drive, partition "M", I will plug it back in and format the old boot drive.
So then windows will boot to drive/partition M, if that works, and C drive will just become a data drive. I understand I probably will have to do some messing in bios, so any help with that will be good.
this will be my 1st build but I am not to bad with computers and have changed cpu's/HD's/gpu's/fans etc etc. but not mobo's and cases. And never changed a O/S onto another drive with a different boot drive letter.
I have an OCZ vertex 3 as my boot drive and a 2TB Hitachi drive as my storage drive. When I installed the system, I changed the 2TB drive letter name to G. Recently, I installed a card reader into my system, which somehow made one of the card slots G and the 2TB D. Now I can't run any of my programs installed on the mechanical drive. I can't even open diskpart
I have the operating system win 7 professional 64 bit but it quit assigning drive letters. I can see the drives (usb flash memory or usb hard drives) in the disk managment and assign a drive letter successfully. I cannot figure out what changed and now my laptop will not assign any drive letters to my external drives automatically.
I had all my external drives renamed when I was using them with my old laptop running XP. Now I have a new laptop with Win 7. I'm still getting used to how things are done Win 7.I want to change my drive letters on my external drives. I used to do it in Win Explorer in XP but in Win 7, I cant figure out how to do it.when I do a search for "drive letter" or "drive name".Can someone tell me how to change drive letter assignment ??I thought the drive letter was ON the external drive .
I have a USB external hard drive that I keep all my documents etc on (had it for years)I upgraded from Vista Home to & Home Premium then had to upgrade recently to Professional to run my Sage. Through all these upgrades my ext. drive ran fine. Occasionally the drvie letter would change if I had something else plugged into the USB, this was always easily corected in disk management by changing the drive path.The connection on the case packed up so I had to get the drive put into a new case, now when I plug it in the drive is assigned G instead of F, I tried to change the drive letter allocation in Disk Management but it won't let me as the program still thinks I have a second ext. hard drive which is labelled F. I suspect this has happened because when the usb connection broke the drive was disconnected suddenly instead of a proper eject.How do I get Disk Management to remove the inactive drive - i can't find any obvious way - eject, delete etc are all missing when I click on tools or tasks.
On an Asus p8z77-v mobo I can set each individual sata port as removeable or not. I am in AHCI mode. My rig has a dock for an ssd drive that I will use as a backup image. when I initialize the ssd It asks "If" I would like to assign a path and drive letter. If I assign X or Z is win 7 gonna have hissy fits if that drive is not present at boot or if I put a different ssd in that dock ?
One of the hard disks suddenly failed to initialized. The first problem I found on this disk was unable to open one of the zip files then the machine crashed. After I restarted the machine the HDD drive was missing from the Computer. My computer has 6 hard drives including the missing one. One is Corsair SSD for the OS and the rest are Samsung, Hitachi and WD all of them are 1TB. When I checked on the Device Manager the Drive is there and the device status is properly working. I checked on the Disk Management and I got a message to Initialize the Disk then I followed the instruction. Again I got an error message " Virtual Disk Manager - The system cannot find the file specified." On the Disk Management windows the status of the Disk is "Unknown 931.51GB Not Initialized- Unallocated". I tried to initialize but the same error I got. I did not name this drive but it named automatically RV 01 and the Location is 0.I use Acronis Disk Director to fix the problem but it cannot change the status to online. What I did last week was I installed some programs to the Drive X instead of Drive C.My computer OS is Windows 7 64bits all the drivers and software are updated.
I am running Windows 7 Pro. Have a external dual dock connected to a estata port. One of the drives assigned letter K often comes up as E and I have to change as application is looking for K. Another disk in this dock works fine. No problems. why this might be happening or anyway to prevent? Seems like when I go to disk management and assign K it should stay that way.
I'm using multiple hard drives to install both fedora and Windows 7. I've followed this online tutorial exactly: Dual-booting Fedora 14 and Windows 7 on a computer with 2 hard drives
The problem I seem to be facing is on the "Add a new Entry Step". His secondary OS partition has a drive letter assigned to it and I do not. I've gone into computer management and have tried to assign a drive letter to either of my secondary OS's hard drive partitions and it will not let me.
All I need is the boot loader to link to my second hard drive when the second option (OS) is chosen.
I deleted my local disk in disk manager.Now I have 200GB free space in disk manager, but it is not unallocated. When I try to make simple volume the computer says that I dont have enough space. What shoud I do?
I deleted my existing OS then created two new partitions on the same drive. Then I installed Vista on one partition and that partition was properly named "c" as ususal. Then I started Windows 7 setup.exe from a different hard drive and let Windows 7 install itself into its own partition. When I got to "My Computer" the Windows 7 partition was labelled as "I" instead of the expected "C" which had never happend before when I did the same thing.
Does anyone know a save way to label the Win 7 drive as "C" while in Windows 7?
Currently my Windows 7 is on the C drive, now my question is this: Is there a way I can say put in a SSD, then copy my entire windows and the Programs Files, Program Files x86 and the users folder to it, then switch my old HDD to the D drive and the SSD to the C and have it work just fine? Is there an easy way to do this? or will it require me to reinstall windows to do it? Been thinking about getting a 120 GB ssd for my os/program drive, and using my 1.5 tb drive as storage.
