I had to use a 3rd party disk manager on one update
wierd hard drive behavior
xp would not add a letter but acronis did
after 2 attempts from a must boot command

Rick,

I can't specify the drive letter on chkdsk (run from XP) because Windows doesn't recognize the drive. So CHKDSK D: /F or CHKDSK E: /F (the next 2 free letters) won't work.


I tried Knoppix but it doesn't like NTFS partitions.

Im not sure if this will help, but with my external HDD (which is a 2.5'') it sometimes requires more power. I have the nornal USB 2.0 cable and another one that plugs into a DC port on the front of the HDD. If I can't see my drive in My Computer but I can in Disk Management, I plug the DC USB adapter in also and it seems to come up.

Probably won't help you, but it's still good to know! :grinthumb

Also, How did you go with plugging it into other PC's?

It's an internal drive not a USB drive, so there's only one power connector.

The best luck I've had so far is NTFS4DOS. I can access it with that. All I have to do is see if I can find a DOS GUI Copying program to ease the transfer of files.

I tried BartPE but it won't work with an OEM version of Windows.

I tried reinstalling Windows but I have XP Home on there and the OEM disk that came with it is XP Pro, so the key won't work.

PowerMax diagnostics find nothing wrong with the drive. A quick low-level format would wipe the first 300MB and the last 100MB, so wanted to avoid that if I could.

A good one I use is called MiniPe or minixpe2.
Its an OS on disk. You should be able to access your data through it once you boot from it.

ok go into your BIOS and make sure that its loading your second drive make it load right after the first dive that has windows on it

Ok, thanks to a great free program called Super Fdisk, the drive is fixed. I booted the computer up with the program on floppy and it said that their was a problem with the partition and asked if I wanted to fix it. I rebooted and Windows recognized the drive!

Here's the link if anyone else wants it:

http://www.shareup.com/Super_Fdisk-download-18631.html

Thats great news! Thanks for updating your post :grinthumb

Any luck solving this yet?

I've got the same problem right now. A fresh format and install of XP, but it won't recognize my Seagate HD that is chock full of my saved info. It sees it, I've initialized it but it won't let me assign a drive letter to it. It did previously. Any solution to this yet?

UPDATE: After I joined and posted this, I saw the answer. Trying it right now. Thanks!

Iight....

K I had the samee problem and I finally got it n figured I'd let u all kno how i did it...Go to your control panel and open up Administrative Tools. From there go to Computer Management. When the window opens up in the left column therre will be a list of things click on Disk Management. Your main system harddrive is always Disk 0. Depending on how many harddrives u have installed will depend on what disk number it is obviously. If the drive does not say "Healthy" than you need to right click it from the drop down list choose assign letter and path do that then right click it again and format it as NTFS. Worked for me the formatting takes a long *** time but its worth it.

Thanks but...

Thanks for posting. My problem isn't that. My problem is that I have 100 gigs of important data on the hard drive which still has no drive letter. I don't want to lose the data. I tried a couple things posted here, to no avail. PC Inspector File Recovery read my disk but didn't find any of my data there. I know it's there, as I haven't reformatted it. I suppose I need to email Seagate for a driver. There isn't a driver download on their web page. They say I don't need one, that the Windows driver works. It doesn't. It's a 250 gig Seagate Barracuda, bought 3 or 4 months ago. It worked fine until I reformatted and reinstalled XP.

I you use the Seagate HDD tools to see if that can help you?

Doncobb:

Did you try that Super Fdisk program? Was there a Red X posted next to the drive letter? Try NTFS4DOS (google search it - can't remember where I got it from) and see if you can access it. Also try creating PE environment (like BartPE) or try running Knoppix.


KA:

The goal is to save the data on it, not format over it.