Question

XP Device Manager sees USB Mass Storage Device but no drive letter allocated

Asked by: Bloodrule

I have just bought an IDE/SATA to USB cable so that I can access a pile of old IDE hard drives without opening the case of my PC. Some of them work immediately, with the drive being recognised, a letter being allocated, and the contents being accessible in Explorer just as if it was any other drive or a USB memory stick.

However most of the drives are recognized by Device Manager as a USB mass storage device, but no drive letter is allocated making them inaccessible. These old drives were all used with Windows 98 and were formatted with FAT32.

Disk management doesn't recognize them either. I have tried on a number of machines running XP or Win 2000.

The drives need to be set as master which I have done in each case but still no luck - recognized as a USB device but that's all.

Any suggestions on how I can access the data on these old drives without having to physically reinstall them?

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Asked On: 2006-06-27 at 17:15:43ID21901423
Tags: drive
,; usb
,; letter
,; device
,; storage
Topics: Hard Drives & Storage
,; Adobe Type Manager
Participating Experts: 2
Points: 500
Comments: 6

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