Member Avatar for Aboonah

I have two external hard-drives on my XP workstation. After starting the machine last week, neither of the drives showed up in the system.

I discovered by clicking on <Safely Remove Hardware> that the system thinks that they are drives with removable storage. I did the following:

1) plugged them into other machines in the office (WinXP, 2000 Server, XP MCE). All saw them the same way.
2) removed the drives and put them in a machine as additional storage. Same thing.

I need to at least recover the data...anyone have an idea of what might be going on?

TIA

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Member Avatar for petecapo

I had the same problem a few weeks ago with a WD external. It had been working fine, then one day I hooked it up, nothing there. I thought I was going to have to format and start over, but I right clicked on "My Computer" went to disk maanagement, assiigned a new drive letter to the external, and everything came back up. No data lost. Hope this helps. << Pete >>

Member Avatar for Aboonah

I tried that early on...but the drives show up as being removable storage with no media inserted. Changing the Drive Letter does not affect that. Clicking on either of them in Win Explorer or My Computer opens a window asking for media to be inserted, also.

>I had the same problem a few weeks ago with a WD external.
>It had been working fine, then one day I hooked it up,
>nothing there. I thought I was going to have to format and
>start over, but I right clicked on "My Computer" went to
>disk maanagement, assiigned a new drive letter to the
>external, and everything came back up. No data lost. Hope
>this helps. << Pete >>

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