Win7 (+ W10) 2nd partition of USB disc not recognized, no drive letter

Hello,

I hope to find help in this forum.
(I just tried another, German Win7 forum but until now they don't have an idea ...).

I'm using an external USB HDD (Toshiba Stor.E Basics, 500GB) which is divided
into two partitions (with "MiniTool Partition Wizard 9").

I've no problems with all my (old) XP prof. systems.

Conecting the HDD to my Win7 prof notebook (Lenovo W500) as well as
to my Win10 home tablet, only the first partition will be recognised.

Here you see the screenshot.


Using MiniTool Partition Wizard (on the Win7 system), the 2nd partion will be found - but without drive letter.


Trying to assign a drive letter with the Minitool results in a positive message, but then, the same state again is displayed: no drive letter. (Assigning a drive letter with Win7 routine is impossible.)

Here, only just mentioning it, the screenshot of the drives and partitions on the XP system:


Any idea?

Thanks in advance!

Hi digait and welcome to sevenforums.
On your external HDD simply right click on unused partition and select "create new simple volume". That should allocate the space as active and assign a new drive letter. See tutorial here.
Partition or Volume - Create New
Hope this helps!

DrmWarrior said:

On your external HDD simply right click on unused partition and select "create new simple volume". That should allocate the space as active and assign a new drive letter. See tutorial here.

I don't have the possibilty to create a volume.

I can only
- format
or
- delete the volume.

It seems that partition is set to "logical". I think that is where the problem is. Here the tutorial for deleting and creating new. Please read ALL steps carefully before proceeding!
Partition or Volume - Delete

Hi,
This is Joker from MiniTool, according to your problem, we have some suggestion below:
We have analysed your issue in details and offer you the following two advices. Please try them out first, assign a drive to the 2nd partition then and tell us the result.
If it doesn't help,
Enter into Device Manager, find and right-click your USB driver under Disk drives, and select Update Driver Software to update your USB driver. or if possible, Dismantle the outer enclosure of your HDD, and connect it via SATA port of your computer directly.

Good news! I found the following solution.

First I made a backup of both the partitions (not only the logical one
because you never know what will happen ...).

Then, using the Minitool Partition Wizard, I simply chose the option
"Set partition as primary". And that was all: No need to format and
restore my data. All data are still existing.