Can't Assign A Drive Letter To Internal Drive

parabrand

System: Dell XPS 400 running XP Media Center, 2.8GHz Duo-Core, 2GB Ram, Nvidia 7800GTX, 250GB SATA Primary HD, 500GB SATA Secondary HD.

My Problem: I did a clean install of the OS. Before doing so, I moved a bunch of files from my primary HD to my secondary HD and then physically removed the secondary HD from the computer. After the OS installation was complete, I reinstalled the secondary HD. The HD is recognized in the BIOS and it shows up in disk manager, however, windows will not assign it a drive letter which means I can't access the drive. When I right click the drive in disk manager, the option to change the drive letter is grayed out. I have spent several hours on the phone with Dell support technicians and they were not able to solve my problem. Does anyone have any ideas how I can get a drive letter assigned to the drive, short of reformatting it? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am at wits end with this.

The drive in question is a Seagate 500 GB Internal SATA Barracuda 7200.9.

BTW, I ran the Seagate troubleshooting tools and no problems were identified with the drive. I'm quite sure this is a software problem.

Thanks for your help!

zero-counter

You need to initialize the disk under disk management.

Taken from the help file built within windows:

To detect new disks
Using the Windows interface

Open Computer Management (Local).
In the console tree, click Device Manager.
Where?

Computer Management
System Tools
Device Manager

On the Action menu, click Scan for hardware changes.
In the console tree, click Disk Management.
Where?

Computer Management (Local)
Storage
Disk Management

On the Action menu, click Rescan Disks.
Notes

To open Computer Management, click Start, and then click Control Panel. Click Performance and Maintenance, click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.
You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings might also prevent you from completing this procedure.
If Disk Management does not detect the new disk after you click Rescan Disks, you might need to restart your computer. New disks appear as Not Initialized. Before you can use a disk, you must first initialize it. For instructions describing how to initialize a disk, click Related Topics. If you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialize the disk.
You can convert new disks to dynamic disks.

parabrand

zero.counter wrote:

You need to initialize the disk under disk management.

Taken from the help file built within windows:

To detect new disks
Using the Windows interface

Open Computer Management (Local).
In the console tree, click Device Manager.
Where?

Computer Management
System Tools
Device Manager

On the Action menu, click Scan for hardware changes.
In the console tree, click Disk Management.
Where?

Computer Management (Local)
Storage
Disk Management

On the Action menu, click Rescan Disks.
Notes

To open Computer Management, click Start, and then click Control Panel. Click Performance and Maintenance, click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.
You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings might also prevent you from completing this procedure.
If Disk Management does not detect the new disk after you click Rescan Disks, you might need to restart your computer. New disks appear as Not Initialized. Before you can use a disk, you must first initialize it. For instructions describing how to initialize a disk, click Related Topics. If you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialize the disk.
You can convert new disks to dynamic disks.

I have tried this. In the Disk Management Tool, the drive shows up as "Healthy" and the drive has a single partition that is primary.

The drive does not show up in explorer or anywhere else. For a lack of windows-terminology, it appears the drive is not mounted.

One odd thing though, when reinstalling windows the portion of the install for formatting the disk applies a drive letter to this second hard drive (namely, F -- C is primary and the two optical drives take up D and E).

Any help is much appreciated!

zero-counter

Is the drive formatted with a relevant file system? Also, ensure that it is not a dynamic disk or at least was not. If the disk was a basic type, then right click on it and tell me what your options are. Also, have you tried right clicking and assigning a drive letter?

parabrand

The right click options only allow me to delete the partition; the desired option of change drive letter is not available. This disk is not dynamic and it is formatted NTFS. Windows is not even assigning the drive a drive letter.

zero-counter

Have you attempted to move it to another SATA connection? Are you logged in as an administrator or is the current account that you are using in the administrator group? Was the old drive part of a RAID set? Usually, if the option is grayed out, that indicates a problem with the filesystem if the drive is showing fine everywhere else. What is disk management referreing to the disk as (description). I would be awesome of you could take a screen shot. You could also delete everything within the following key: HKLM\System\MountedDevices
Backup the registry before doing so, as I am not responsible for any problems.
Otherwise, look through this KB.