Try these steps:

1. Right click My Computer and select Manage.
2. Click on Disk Management.

In the right hand window you should see all of your drives with their drive letter. Assuming you have one internal drive and one CD/DVD drive you should see:

C:
D:

If you see another drive listed but without a drive letter do the following:

1. Right click the drive and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.
2. Click the Change button.
3. Select a Drive letter and click OK.

Now check My Computer for the drive.

I'm having the same issue.
I have 2 internal drives that work fine (C, & D) and then I have a USB hub on my printer that I changed to P and an external DVD drive that I change to H. The problem drive use to be my primary in my old computer but when I upgraded I got another hard drive as my primary and another "secondary" internal one. I just wanted to transfer all my files over. I did put this drive as an internal but am having the same problems. It shows up in Disk Management but I cannot assign it a drive letter or anything. The only thing that I can do is Delete Partition and Help. This drive has all my files, emails, and other important stuff that I need so I can't format it.

Any suggestion would be wonderful! asap

This may be a dumb question but did you configure the jumper on the drive to Primary/Slave/Cable select?

Did you try putting it into an Ext. enclosure?

Is it the only drive on the cable internally?

Scott

I got the same problem with my secondary hard drive. It has been malfunctioning for quite some time but this time its already not functioning.

Do you think if i reformat and partition it, will it work again?

Im still hoping I could retrieve my files from there.

Thanks.

Anorexea

you can try Hiren's Boot CD

I was just wondering if anyone could help me with a problem im having with my hard drive . It kind of relates to the problem for this thread .. Basically I was using my pc one night when i was getting these error windows. During this time all I was doing was dragging and dropping stuff off one external hard drive to a newer one. So I restarted the pc and could never get back into windows. Kept saying a hard ware or electrical malfunction could of caused the problem . please run the fix or start normally . So I did both . No luck . So I took it to Best buy where i bought the serive plan an they ran a test and the hard drive is bad. They swapped it out for a new one free .. And gave me the old hard drive .. I want to try to recover stuff of it . So I plugged it in my pc . Doesnt show in my computer or management .. But it shows in my bios . Now If i put it in a external enclosure it shows in my computer but takes for ever to double click it . and once it goes through it says this drive is not yet formatted would u like to ? Of course i clicked no . for now . So anyone have any other ideas on what i can do to recover data . My favorites for IE. i mean its not life or death stuff but there are things i cant replace.

By the way .. SATA Hard drive . Im running Vista ..

I need help. i tried to solve it by going through the posts .
But I can't got the exact solution. i need help. My problem is as follows:

My hard disk (Maxtor Home basic) is connected to UBUNTU 9.0, while using
data from the hard-disk abruptly the hard disk USB is unplugged by a kid.
Now when i connect it to computer again it is not working.

But it is showing in device manager> disk drives. But i am neither able to see it in MY_COMPUTER not in DISK-MANAGEMENT.

I tried to connect the hard disk in windows- xp - sp3, windows 7 and
unbuntu 9.0. But it is not showing in my computer.

the hard-disk light is glowing, which shows that hard-disk is working.
hard-disk is external power supply, maxtor-home basic, 1 TB

looking forward for your reply

Thanks and reg
ant_jar

(for the original poster of this thread)

Sounds like you just recently installed windows and this secondary drive is a SATA drive. Windows won't automatically allocate or partition a secondary sata drive when installed. I highly recommend:

Powerquest Partition Magic

This program will allocate the drive to a partition and format it to NTFS. That should be all you need to do.

@ant_jar

You were writing data to the hard drive when it was unplugged, which means some files are partial or missing. Computers automatically read and index the contents of a hard drive when you plug them in. So when you plug in your hard drive, the computer tries to index partial files and is unable to find the rest of those partial files on the drive, so it gives up trying to load the drive. You need to format the drive. To do this go to:

control panel(classic view) > Administrative Tools > Disk Management.
Right-Click on the drive that is not working and click "Format". Click "OK" on the dialogue that appears.

Note: This will cause you to lose all data on the hard drive. Unfortunately, it's the only solution that I know of. So considering it's your only solution, you've essentially lost your data already.

calm down there buddy, don't get too crazy 😛

When you have multiple sata drives and install windows on one of them with no raid set up, windows won't allocate the other drives. You have to do it yourself. Yes, the drive that you installed windows on will be allocated; but xp for some reason won't allocate the others. Why do I know this? I just built my system 3 days ago and had to do this.

Note: We're both correct. If a hard drive comes preformatted to the NTFS file system then windows will recognize it, but the point i was making was to get his hard drive to work. So I explained how to fix HIS situation. His drive was obviously not preformatted to the NTFS file system, so he needs to allocate the space for the drive and format it to a file system.

thanks for your quick replies dudes...

But problem is that, I cant see my hard-disk in disk-management 😟 . only in disk-drives i can see that hard disk.

The maxtor external hard-disk has 4 partitions. all partions has almost full data.

which means that, it is not a new disk.

while i am retriving data it is unplugged.

dose it mean that i lost all data.

can i retrive data again using retriving tools 😛

but when i connect the hard disk of the usb to the computer, i can see the notification on the desk-top that usb- is connected to the computer.

Did you tried to format your computer ? and maybe other OS and see what happens then ? I suggest to backup your data before that so you can recover quickly over the loss ( you can use an free online storage backup software like Dmailer Backup Software

Hope you will get things working

Try replacing the SATA Cable might work for you.

It sounds like you haven't formatted your new disk yet. Right click on My Computer and choose Manage. Then browse to your disks and find the unformatted disk and format it as NTFS or FAT32, should be all better.

Wow! Thank you guys SO much. I was about ready to punch the wall with this - got new HD, did the jumper, installed it - BIOS / Setup was seeing it, but XP hadn't given it a drive letter. No instructions in box or Western Digital website explained how to solve this.

Googled the question and was lead here - followed your suggestion and it's working! Thank you so much. I seriously would like to throw $20 your way .... the co-pay I'd have spent if I'd punched the wall 🙂

Do you guys have a PayPal account?

THANKS AGAIN SO MUCH! $ aside, you really made a difference to my sanity tonight. Good job.

One question - I'm replacing an old (7 year old) HD that was running out of space, making terrible groaning and grinding noises and otherwise indicating (slow response, etc) that it's on its way to the great hereafter for hard drives.

Now that the new one is hooked up and being recognized and has its very own drive letter (D:), can I just XCOPY the C: drive over, remove the C: HD, made D: the master drive? Are there any necessary parameters for XCOPY to ensure this will work? I know in the past there was an issue with "short filenames", but I've heard the newer versions of XCOPY will address them if the proper switch is used - are these the right swtiches? --

xcopy c:*.* d:./e/c/h/r/k

THANKS AGAIN!