Windows 7 Doesn't Assign Drive Letter With 2nd Western Dig Elements Drive
Apr 25, 2011
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 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 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.
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.
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"
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 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?
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 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.
Just the other day my wife and I are watching several movies on my external hard drive, which has a plethora of movies we've gathered. It's not even that old, less than a year old.I have three computers in our house
Not a single one of these computers even so much as detect the hard drive at all now. I tried a different usb cable as well, and i got nothing. I tried different wall outlets, it still blinks when I plug it in the computer, but the computer doesn't remotely see it.I first noticed a problem when I tried to download a new movie using utorrent. It started the file, and then failed saying something was wrong with like cyncro or something. Whatever, I looked up the error code. Appears others have had this issue as well, so I did what they said, "chkdsk /r" on my hard drive (J:/). It got to step five, but froze there...got nothing, for over 6 hours it sat there and not a thing at all.So I cancelled it, closed it out, and restarted the computer with the device plugged in.it reboots, and now...absolutely nothing. It doesn't even see that a drive exists.like I said, I've changed out the cables, moved power outlets, tried different computers and different ports, and done these steps on each of them:
1. Checked device manager...doesn't even show it on any of the computers.
2. Checked printers and devices..not even a hint.
3. Checked hidden devices on device manager...not even there.
I just recently had another issue. I was trying to get my ALFA AWSU036NHR wifi modem to work, but it wouldn't work. The difference was, I could see the device, the driver just didn't work. I fixed it by finding the driver (which was ridiculously hard to do until I start looking outside of the Alfa network of drivers and looked towards realtech. I downloaded a torrent of driver packs for windows 7 32 and 64.
I just received my new WD Elements 3TB External drive and at find it worked fine and I was copy files to it and it seem to of froze and the files stopped copying (using TeraCopy) so I pressed cancel to stop the transfer and it wouldn't stop so I just unplugged the drive and now it doesn't show up in windows anymore. I went into Disk Management and it shows up but i cannot do anything to it. The Initilize disk pops up and I click GBP and it fails and says Media is write protected.
I have a Seagate 1.5 TB Free Agent External Hard Drive . I have a folder with approx500 GB in this H.D. This folder have some other 3 -400 folders . Sudenly , when I open the H.D. I cannot see this folder ; when I check the H.D.'s properties the folders / files are in the H.D.
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 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 plug in a Western Digital external USB 2.0 drive (Usually sold at Costco) Don't have the model but as soon as I plug it in, I got a blue screen of death! I thought that was the end of the blue screen. I believe this is normal since the pool of plug and play drivers it's probably not up to date with all the various divices out there. I have plug in my Kanguru drive and Kingston flash drive without any problems.
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?
i've been asked to set up 6 brand new Dell laptops bought for my software engineers in the industy - i have been given a 7th Dell laptop same as the other 6 which has had all the required software needed by our engineers for the machinery programing process installed on it - i've also been given a 1TB western Digital {USB connected} external hard drive for cloning the software and transfering it on to the other laptops, so this afternoon i cloned the 7th laptop with all the software on it using system back up - creating a system image file on the external hard drive, but when it came to transfering this image on to the other laptops, i thought i'd beable to restore {set up the C: drive} the new laptop from the file path E: {the external hard drive path} but it doesn't have the option {E: drive or USB input or external drive} only system restore/back up disk or network path, i can't use the network path as the company has access/permission,firewall blockers that basically stop our engineers laptops from working on customers sites when online, which kind of stops any work from happening, and is why the company.
I opened my external drive case and took the 3.5" hard drive out so that I could connect to the computer internally with a SATA cable because I don't have an external SATA cable and internal SATA interface. I started the Windows 7 Ultimate system. The computer screen remained on "Starting Windows" forever.If my memory serves me right, I remember I did manage to access it with another computer before. That computer has been out of service. At present I can access it while the drive is in the case connected with a USB cable. The Windows explorer shows all the partitions in the drive.
So it was working fine until one of the latest windows auto update, i turned off my computer and went to bed, when turned it on the next morning the drive was no longer showing up so i checked disc management and it was in there as unallocated, the only options that are there when i right click are: Offline, Properties and help.Im running Windows 7 ultimate x64 on a sony vaio VPCL118FG and the External Hard Drive is a Western Digital 2TB Model WDBAAU0020HBK?
I have a WD Passport, vintage 2007. I cannot access some large files that I created several years ago that I want to see, and then dump so I can use the file for backup for my new computer.
So I bought a used 2 TB Hard drive and it supposedly was only used a couple of times and I got a good deal.I plugged it in and the software was installed successfully but it doesn't show up in the explorer with a drive letter. Now when I go to the device manager it does show up but I am not able to format it or give it a letter etc. Also like I said in the title it doesn't have a fat32 or NTFS File System.The hard drive I right clicked is the one I am talking about.
My western digital usb 3.0 external hard drive is giving only 1 MB/Sec transfer rate. I know its really very slow. Can any one let me know what we could do increase the speed.
In Windows XP, in My computer, when ! sorted drives by Name, they are sorted by the drive label. This is the what I would expect. In Windows 7, when I sorted drives by name, they are sorted by the drive letter. Is there a way to sort by drive label in Windows 7.
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 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 .
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 ?
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.
