Old Western Digital IDE not assigned drive letter but is recognized

[mphsgal]

Hi all, newbie here. Thanks for any advice and direction re: posting.

All I want to do is see what's on the old drive, specifically find out whether or not it has XP installed before I install it back into the tower it came from (a Compaq that has other problems not worth fixing if this IDE drive isn't bootable). If it has XP, fine - but it was set to slave.

I've connected the IDE drive, a Western Digital Protege (40GB), to my Win7 HP Pavilion Slimline via an Ultra "USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA cable adapter" with the jumper set to master as directed. I've tried plugging the drive in to both the front USB port and a back one. The drive spins up fine. I tried to boot from it on my HP and it won't do it.

No matter where the USB cable is plugged in, the Protege is recognized by BIOS, appears to be shown in the Registry but with multiple entries/weird prefixes, and shows up in Disk Management as Disk 1 but without a drive letter. I can't assign a drive letter to it in DM - the only option not greyed out is Delete Volume:








In elevated command prompt, the disk does not show up via the "list volume" command.

So. I think I read somewhere (been searching for an answer for 3 hours now) that you can't change the drive letter when it contains an OS. Is this true? Is there a way for me to assign a drive letter/examine the files on this IDE drive?

Thanks again.
Lisa

 

[Mark Phelps]

In my experience, when you're connecting a single drive this way, you generally do not have any jumpers set. You could try it that way to see if it makes any difference.

And no, it doesn't matter if any partitions on the drive contain an OS. I do this stuff all the time for the same reasons -- reusing an older drive that has an OS installed on it. I've not had problems assigning drive letters to the partitions on the drives.

 

[Kaktussoft]

Disk 1 has 1 partition. It is 37GB large and is 100% free.... at least that's in display. But he doesn't know what file system type is!!

In elevated command prompt:

diskpart
sel  disk  1
list  part
sel  part  1
det  part

post output

btw: you can't assign a drive letter because win7 doesn't understand the file system

 

[mphsgal]

Prompt results

Disk 1 has 1 partition. It is 37GB large and is 100% free.... at least that's in display. But he doesn't know what file system type is!!

In elevated command prompt:

diskpart
sel  disk  1
list  part
sel  part  0
det  part

post output

btw: you can't assign a driver letter because win7 doesn't understand the file system

Here it is:



Thanks, thought it might be the file sys but it should be FAT32 on that drive...?
L

PS: Mark - no jumper is set, making the drive a master. Sorry for the confusion.

 

[Kaktussoft]

Do

diskpart
sel  disk  1
sel  part  1
det  part

so part 1 instead of part 0

 

[mphsgal]

2nd try results diskpart

Do

diskpart
sel  disk  1
sel  part  1
det  part

so part 1 instead of part 0

Thanks - I should have caught that, LOL

 

[Kaktussoft]

So type of partition is 44.

44 GoBack partition GoBack is a utility that records changes made to the disk, allowing you to view or go back to some earlier state. It takes over disk I/O like a Disk Manager would, and stores its logs in its own partition.

Source Partition types: List of partition identifiers for PCs

You ever used an utility called GoBack?

 

[Kaktussoft]

Solution: If you need to modify partitions on a hard disk that is being monitored by GoBack, you must first disable GoBack. To do this, go to GoBack�·s Main Menu, click Options, and then select Disable GoBack. Before you begin modifying your partitions, you must first reboot your computer. After you have rebooted and finished making partition modifications, you can then re-enable GoBack.

In some instances, however, disabling GoBack apparently isn't enough. GoBack seems to embed itself into the Master Boot Record of the source drive and it must be fully un-installed from the source drive BEFORE any copying can take place. (Once you have uninstalled GoBack, you must also reboot the machine.) It may also be necessary to do an FDISK /MBR to repair the master boot record. Once this is done, you should have no problems. If GoBack still has a lock on the partitions you will need to contact Adaptec to have the references removed correctly. After you have finished using your PowerQuest product to manipulate partitions, you may, of course, reinstall GoBack.