no drive letters in external hard drive

[Spencer]

I have recently bought a new Dell work station that came with 3 gb ram, an Intel core 2 duo processor, an nvidia graphic card and 1 250 gb Seagate Hard drive. I have also bought an western digital external hard drive for backup and all and it used to work fine. Now a days its drive letters doesnt gets allocated by the OS which wasnt the case before. So basically the drive is recognized but I cant access these drives which is giving me a lot of trouble. So if anyone can advice me how to solve this issue, it would be great.

[T.J.]

Are you sure that you external hard drives are properly plugged in? Apart from that I cant suggest you anything else if its a simple case of hard drive failure or so. I guess if it is in warranty then what you can do is simple replace it and get yourself a new hard drive without being too much concerned or getting into to much hassles. You can also perform a SMART check which will tell you whether your drive is at fault or not.

[ApPy10]

I would first like to know that when you first connected your external hard drive in your computer's usb port what was the response? Did your computer recognized your drive with a prompt saying "new USB device found" or not and afterwards what came? You can try one solution I can offer to determine the case of fault is with the case or the drive is the combination in another pc with case or drive you can do and check what happens.

[Maxforu]

I think that you should be aware of new drive or mapped network drive are not available in Windows Explorer. To prevent this issue from occurring, when you map a network drive, assign the highest available drive letter to the mapped network drive. To work around this issue if the new volume appears in Disk Management, specify a different drive letter for the new device or volume. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Right-click My Computer, and then click Manage.
2. Under Computer Management (Local), click Disk Management.
3. In the list of drives in the right pane, right-click the new drive and then click Change Drive Letter and Path(s).
4. Click Change, and in the drop-down box, select a drive letter for the new drive that is not assigned to a mapped network drive.
5. Click OK, and then click OK again.

[Rawko]

You can also change drive letter to a free one via registry.

1.Login to Windows as an Administrator.
2.Open Registry Editor by typing regedit (or regedt32.exe in older Windows prior to XP) in Run command of Start Menu and then press Enter.
3.Navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices

4.Optional step which not required in Windows XP or later, right click on MountedDevices, then select Permissions. You can also click Permissions from the Security menu.
5.Optional step which not required in Windows XP or later, check the option to make sure that Administrators have full control to the registry key. Change and revert back this setting when you are finished with the reset of the steps.

Morer information here.

[deoWo]

Did you try manually assigning a drive letter to the drive? Below are the methods how to do it:

• Log on as Administrator or as a member of the Administrators group.
• Click Start, click Control Panel, and then click Performance and Maintenance.

Note If you do not see Performance and Maintenance, go to step 3. Performance and Maintenance appears in Control Panel only if you use Category view. If you use Classic view, Performance and Maintenance does not appear.

• Click Administrative Tools, double-click Computer Management, and then click Disk Management in the left pane.
• Right-click the drive, the partition, the logical drive, or the volume that you want to assign a drive letter to, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
• Click Add.
• Click Assign the following drive letter if it is not already selected, and then either accept the default drive letter or click the drive letter that you want to use.
• Click OK.