Windows 7 - WD external HD recognised as

Hi everybody,

I have a weird situation on an Windows 7 x64 OS. I have 2 Western Digital My book essential external hard disk (1TB each) and they are not both correctly recognised by the OS. They are both detected but one of them is recognised as CD Drive.

I have another 2 internal hard disk - one is partitioned in 2 partitions (C & D), the other has one single partition (E). One of the external HD is correctly recognised as HDD (letter assigned J), but the other external HDD (which has 2 partitions - H & I) is recognised as CD Drive - please see attached screenshot.

It is not a problem related to formatting as both external HDD have been formatted in NTFS. Actually, if I disconnect the external drive that is correctly assigned (J), the other external HDD becomes available as HDD with both its partitions.

Please advise if it has to do with letter assignment or Windows 7 has a maximum no. of partitions recognised as HDD?

TKS.

Welcome to Windows Seven Forums.

Please post a screenshot of your Disk Management layout so that we can see how your partitions are configured.

You can have up to four primary partitions on each hard drive, and then create logical partitions within the fourth primary partition if you need more.

As for your WD external drives, you could try changing their drive letters to say, X and Y, so that they are well away from your internal hard drives.

Hi, thanks for reply. Changing the drive letters doesn't help.
I attach a print scr. from the disk management page.

it's not about any drive letter limit it goes from A to Z (beginning with C for harddrives)
I would say only one drive is recognized. Unplug them and try to plug them back in, in the opposite order one at a time.

BTW: Did you ever open one of those "CD drives" to see what's in there?
It has( amongst others) a file called "What is this.html" which starts out like this:

-DG

Edit: Oh we cross-posted you just posted the screen print and see drive 2 is shown as offline
try the replugging (directly into the computer if you can)
-DG

Hi, on the "false CD Drives" there is the file you mentioned.

However I managed to get the external HDD online by right clicking it - so this has fixed the problem, everything is showing as it should except the 2 WD CD drives which are still present in My Computer drives list. However this is not actually an issue, as I managed to get the 2 external drives to work simultaneously. Thanks a lot for help !