problems trying to use old int HDD in ext caddy

Alienfingers

My old PC died (ended up being motherboard problem Im told) so I treated myself to a nice new DELL one. Ive got alot of stuff (pics etc) on the old HDD (western digital 80GB IDE) and because I didnt want any warranty problems with opening case on my new PC, I decided to get a USB external enclosure. Ive put the 80gig drive in and new pc did the whole "new hardware found" thing when first plugged it in and told me it was installed and ready to use but I couldnt find it under "My Computer".
Ive right clicked and gone to "Manage" and it is shown under "Disk Management" as Disk 1, with one partition showing as 74.53GB NTFS Healthy (Active). Someone suggested right clicking the partition and trying to "Change drive letter and path" but this is greyed out (the only option when right click is "delete partition" and "help".

I really want to get the data off this HDD and thought the ext enclosure would be easy way but apparently not-anyone got ideas what I could do to sort this?

movieman

Weird... the external Lacie drive I have here just appears automatically.

I'm not sure what could confuse Windows into not displaying the disk or letting you set the drive letter... I've never seen it do that before.

Mr_Squiddy

I did have a similar problem once but the solution was a bit obscure - I present it here 'just in case'.

There is a utility called 'Powertoys for XP' and part of that utility is an app called TweakUI. In TweakUI there is an option to select or deselect which drive letters are available for new drives. For some reason I had deselected all but C: and for the HD partitions and E: for the DVD-ROM. This meant that when I added a new drive (I think it was an iPod) it simply didn't show up in My Computer.

It might be worth getting hold of TweakUI if you don't have it and check to see if that's the problem.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

P.

odowdchr

movieman wrote:

Weird... the external Lacie drive I have here just appears automatically.

I'm not sure what could confuse Windows into not displaying the disk or letting you set the drive letter... I've never seen it do that before.

Often if you've got mapped drives set up, or lots of network drives...the removable device is supposed to be G but G is already assigned etc..
Sometimes it won't automatically move onto the next available letter as Mr Squiddy says.

Alienfingers

Mr_Squiddy wrote:

I did have a similar problem once but the solution was a bit obscure - I present it here 'just in case'.

There is a utility called 'Powertoys for XP' and part of that utility is an app called TweakUI. In TweakUI there is an option to select or deselect which drive letters are available for new drives. For some reason I had deselected all but C: and for the HD partitions and E: for the DVD-ROM. This meant that when I added a new drive (I think it was an iPod) it simply didn't show up in My Computer.

It might be worth getting hold of TweakUI if you don't have it and check to see if that's the problem.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx

P.

Thanks for this but it hasnt worked, def useful to know though for future. anyone else any other ideas? It shows up in device manager and reckons it is working properly but it isnt showing up in my computer in order for me to access it.