Disappearing USB HDD Volume and Letter

[fosbergroad]

Hello World:

Last week life was fine. My eight year old Windows XP PC was limping alone OK with the C: Drive (32 GB HDD FAT32) and my G: Drive (IOMEGA 149GB USB). I say limping alone as a year or so back my CD-ROM Drives (D: & E had died for reasons I can't remember. So, missing my CD-ROM drives I started working on the issue. Nothing simple such as a driver re-install, BIOS reset, or system recovery solved the problem and after much searching I down loaded a registry script to reset my drives. After a reboot, the CD-ROM Drives resurfaced! Case Solved with one glich; my G: drive no longer was visible in My Computer. Must of been something I did to fix the other problem.

So now the 'Disk 1/ FAT32 Partition' DOES show in Disk Management just below my C: HDD. Yet, I am unable assign a letter to the drive (option not available). The drive is listed as 'DISK 1' yet it does not have a VOLUME number.

I am assuming that I have some contention happening between my CD-ROM drives and my IOMEGA drive previously know as G: drive.

My wife has about 50 GB of family photo's on this drive so I am praying that I will not need to reformat.

Any suggest here would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,
Bob

 

[kimsland]

Guide: Troubleshoot: Windows Won't Recognize USB Hard Drive / Fix Unassigned Drive Letter

Also if you have Norton GoBack installed > uninstall it
And if you manually mapped any drives, disconnect them

• To disconnect a mapped drive:
  1. Click Start, and then click Run.
  2. In the Open box, type cmd.
  3. Type net use x: /delete, where x: is the drive letter of the shared resource.
  
  
• Disconnect from a mapped network drive
  1. Click Start, and then click My Computer.
  2. Right-click the icon for the mapped drive.
  3. Click Disconnect.