Hard disk doesn't get a drive letter in Windows 7

Hello there. Recently I've bought a new computer. Since I had some valuable info on my old one, I've transferred the old hard disks to my new one. The problem is I can't see one of the drives in Windows Explorer. So I went to Disk Management and the hard disk is there but it doesn't have a drive letter... Naively I thought I'll just assign it one... and here's the real problem: all right click options except "Delete Volume" and "Help" are grayed out! What can I do?

 

Take a look at the drive using Partition Wizard. What does it look like in that program? (screenshot would be helpful)

I'm interested in if it shows only the one 149gb partition and the 80gb as unallocated. Also if the 149gb partition is seen as NTFS and whether or not when you right-click that partition and select Explore then you can see your files.

 

This is getting weirder... With Partition Wizard I see a 70 GB NTFS drive which I can explore and 80 GB unallocated. Another naive try with
right click -> change letter -> apply
fails as it claims that all changes are applied successfully then the drive letter magically disappears.

 

That is very strange. I don't want to mess anything up--so I would go slow.

Do you recall how you had the drive partitioned in the old machine? How much of the 230gb was being used (partition size and or used/free space)?

There are a couple of things I would try:

Get another partition program either Easeus or TestDisk and see how they read the drive. (Basically, see if we can get two programs to agree on what the partitions look like.)

Then try the Partition Recovery option in one of the programs to see what the list of possible partitions looks like. You don't have to write the changes that a scan provides and can always just cancel but that might give some information.

Easeus has to be installed; TestDisk is stand-alone but barebones interface.

 

One other thought is does that HD still show/work correctly in the old machine?

 

The old machine is too broken, to the point that buying a new one was much more efficient and cheap than trying to fix and upgrade it.

The 80 GB "unallocated" space was used for Linux experiments and the rest was split to 3 NTFS partitions run under Windows XP.

Instead of trying 20 different drive utilities I've figured I better try to recover as much as I can with File Scavenger first.

But the problem still bugs me...

 

What size are the old hard disks?

 

I've had good luck with all three applications I mentioned. I'd skip Easeus because it does not allow any user input but just decides what is missing and corrects it. In your case you are looking for 3 NTFS partitions created before whatever is on their now. So I would not use that.

See what your scavenger program recovers and then maybe consider partition recovery. Not necessary if you already save your files.

Partition Wizard is pretty good at giving you a list of available partitions and letting you double click those it finds to see if you can find your files before restoring. It also has both a quick and deep scan. (TestDisk does basically the same but is more difficult to navigate. I will say TestDisk always works and is a great program but not always the best choice for initial assessment.)

Consider giving PW a chance to do a Full Disk and Quick Scan (will take quite a while because of the unallocated space-about an hour for 80gb unallocatted is my guess. It has to go through unallocated space sector by sector looking for old partitions.) Look at picture 4 http://www.partitionwizard.com/help/partition-recovery.html you would be looking to see if some of the starting/ending numbers overlap and try to figure out which partitions are correct. Double clicking a partition in the list should bring up a directory tree showing the files.