Hard Drive not appearing in My Computer; fine in BIOS and Device Manager

nickcave · 11-09-2009 12:28PM #1

Hello,

I've recently tore the old 2.5" Toshiba hard drive from my Creative Zen Xtra. I'm trying to recover my old music. I'm using a 2.5"/3.5" IDE adapter to hook it up to my PC. I'm connecting it in place of my DVD drive which I won't need while I'm copying files over etc. The drive shows up fine in the BIOS, and in the device manager. However, in My Computer it just shows my two SATA hard drives, but not the IDE one (the one I want).

Any ideas?

NothingMan · 11-09-2009 12:30PM

This can just be because of a Drive letter conflict.

Go to Device manager and assign it a drive letter that is definitely not being used and it should show up. like Z or soemthing way down the list.

nickcave · 11-09-2009 12:43PM

thanks. I've been through the device manager and can't figure out how to do that. how do I?

corkproducers · 11-09-2009 12:47PM

Go into control panel -> admin tools -> computer management -> disk management.

You should be able to see the drive there,
right click on it and you should be able to assign a drive letter.

nickcave · 11-09-2009 12:48PM

I think I've found what you're talking about. Under the volumes tad I click populate and change it from there? This works with my sata drives but when I do it for the IDE drive it says status: uninitialized, and doesn't give any drive letter.

Nietzschean · 11-09-2009 12:49PM

if i remember those zen's correctly they didn't use fat32 for the partitions, so it won't show up in my computer, you'd need special software to extract the music......

nickcave · 11-09-2009 12:52PM

yeah I've initialised it now and it says it's unallocated space, rather than a partition etc., and the only option I have in Windows is to format it. So if it's FAT32 that might explain that. What software can do this for me?

NothingMan · 11-09-2009 12:56PM

Nietzschean wrote: »

if i remember those zen's correctly they didn't use fat32 for the partitions, so it won't show up in my computer, you'd need special software to extract the music......

Sorry NickCave, if that's correct and it isn't NTFS or FAT32 formatted it will not be recognised on your PC. You can reformat it, but that would erase everything, which would be useless to you.

Found a forum similar to this, didn't read through it all, but maybe you'll find something.

http://www.askaboutmoney.com/showthread.php?t=22271

Hard Drive not appearing in My Computer; fine in BIOS and Device Manager

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