First post, interesting dilemna (to me anyway) :)

A

almark

New Member
Greetings all!

Recently my HP laptop with Windows XP Home began having problems... one day I booted it up to receive an "OS not found" message and it froze. I pulled the hard drive, an IBM TravelStar 40 gig, and placed it in one of those aluminum boxes that allow you to access Laptop HDDs through a USB cable. Well, the disk does not show up under "My Computer". I went to the Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management.

The drive shows up there, with one healthy 40 gig NTFS partition. I am unable to assign it a drive letter or view its properties.

Is there an extra step I have to make here? My goal is to be able to use the HDD like one of those removable travel hard drives, especially since it has all my old data on it, and I know my HDD enclosure works because I've used it successfully with other hard drives... any suggestions? :confused:
 
im a little confused....u say it has a healthy 40 gig partition. did u format the os off of it?

and im assumuing u have 2 hd, b/c u say u connected it to the computer. unless u mean another computer. can u plz explain a bit clearer what u need? :)
 
Yeah, sorry about that. I tend to think faster than I can type. ;)

Laptop came with a 40 gig hd. I originally thought this hd was causing the problems I was having so I pulled it out of my laptop. I bought a 60 gig hd and installed it in the laptop with no problems. Now I've got this 40 gig HD that was originally in the laptop sitting around my room, collecting dust. I haven't done anything to it, aside from pulling it out of the laptop... no formatting or anything like that. I took the 40 gig HD and put it in an enclosure, then hooked it up to my desktop computer via USB cable. Plugged it in. 40 gig winds up and the little "safely remove hardware" icon appears in my tray, just like it would if I'd plugged in a USB memory stick or something similar. However, no new drive appears under "My Computer". So I check out the disk management util in the control panel. It shows my HD for my desktop computer (Disk 0), and it shows the 40 gig HD that is now hooked up via USB cable (Disk 1). On Disk 1, it shows:
"HPNOTEBOOK"
37.24 GB (NTFS)
Healthy (Active)

It has no drive letter assigned, and assigning one isn't an option. When I right click on that partition, the only options it shows are "Delete Partition..." and "Help".

I'm not sure if I clarified or obfuscated further... lemme know if you need more data. Thanks for the help! :)
 
ok, is ur 60 gb new hd ntfs like the 40 gb is? and u also say u didnt do anything to it, so does this mean it still has winxp files on it, and all ur personal files? and most importantly, which im pretty sure i know the answer, u want to keep all ur personal files, right?
 
Johnnyboy0056:
Yes, the 60 gb is NTFS as well... and the 40 gig has quite a few personal files on it. And yeah, I'd definitely like to keep 'em if I can. :)

Qlutch:
Desktop computer is running winxp Pro.

The HD I'm trying to pull stuff off of (the 40 gig) and the computer I'm hooking it up to are the same file system (NTFS)... I'm really not sure why I can't assign a drive letter to the partition on the 40 gig and pull stuff off. Is it possible that I'm locked out of the 40 gig HD for some reason? This doesn't seem possible to me, but I suppose it could be. The only other thought I had is that the partition type on the 40 gig is "master boot record"... dunno if that makes a difference, or if the jumpers are set up for master and you can't use a master drive as a removable device or something?
 
almarkor said:
if the jumpers are set up for master and you can't use a master drive as a removable device or something?
Click to expand...
the drive with windows on should be set up as master and the 40 gig shoudl be set up as slave.
 
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