Problem: No drive letter for IDE HDD

[Mobius]

HDD is an old 20GB thing. It's a system disc from an older machine. It has XP Home installed on it.

Remove from old PC, plug into IDE channel (with jumper set correctly as Master, and connected to the end of the 80-wire IDE cable) of new PC. Disc correctly shows in BIOS. Boot into Windows. No drive letter.

Disc Manager: sees drive, NTFS partition, healthy, active, 31% free space. No Drive letter assigned, and the only option when right clicking is \"Delete partition\".

OK, so I remove it from the new box and plug it into my personal box, which has (literally) had dozens of HDDs plugged into it. Same thing: Bios sees it. Windows sees it - but no drive letter! GRRRR.

Windows even comes up with the \"Detected new Hardware\" ballon. And then a \"ST34109223 Hard Disk Drive\" and even a \"Your new hardware is ready to use\" balloon!

Device Manager shows the thing correctly, and correctly identifies its size, and type etc.

This isn't fatal, but it is a damn pain, because it means I have to put the old machine on the network, and copy across the whole disc via a puny 100Mb/s LAN connection.

Oh, I forgot to mention, both PCs I've tried the drive in are SATA-based systems. But my personal PC also has 2 IDE HDDs as backups.

Any idea how to make the drive viewable on a different windows box, without shagging it for the original box?

[KoolBear]

Is this a secondary drive? Did you set the jumpers to slave?

[Krom]

In disk manager does the drive show up in the graphical list of drives under the list of partitions? If the partiton is there you should be able to right click it and assign a drive letter to it, since it doesnt work try sticking the drive back in the old computer and running checkdisk on it.

And try setting the jumper to cable select.

[Mobius]

I tried \"master\" and \"cable select\" on the drive: no difference. Yes the partition shows correctly, but the only right-click option not greyed out is \"delete partition\".

Will try a \"chkdsk\" on it.

[Top_Rung]

Maybe this will work.

Rescan controllers: Try ALt-F in the BIOS (this works in most DELLs at least) and it reset controllers....

When you exit and reboot, it will scan all controllers again and assign accordingly.

-- I am curious, so please post back.