XP see's my external drive but has no or allows letter assigned.

I have taken out my SEAGATE harddrive from my desktop computer as the computer has crashed. Before I rebot my computer I need to recover the data off the drive. I have bought a SATA external USB dock and have connected it to my laptop with the harddrive in the cradel.

The computer recognises the Drive and can be viewed as a 360GB harddrive in Disk management. However the drive has no letter assigned to it and when I right click on the drive and try and change drive name all the options are "greyed" out.

Am I going about recovering the Data the correct way. And why wont XP allow me to rename the drive so I can see it on MY Computer.

I am running windows XP service pack 1, the C: drive and the external drive are using NTFS.

 

Right-click on drive …. Properties….. Security tab….. click your name (user) to see the permissions you have

 

All of the options are greyed out aswell, windows is not letting me access it at all. I have tried the drive on a vista computer and IU have the same problem. Is there a better way to recover the data off this disk, or is it lost for ever???

 

What if you go directly through My Computer? Right click My Computer, then select Disk manager, right click on the drive (hopefully it's in the selection) and select Change drive letter and path. Maybe that will do the trick.

Good luck!

 

You should try to boot with an Ultimate Boot CD and try assess from there
http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/

 

Partial solution found

Have tried these things and windows still wont let me see it. I have tried using hardware recovery software which allows access to the drive and files can be found. However the only software I have found is demos and it does not allow you to save the data. Does anyone know of some freeware that I could use as I dont wanna fork out 60 bucks just to pay for a key code.

Cheers

 

If the Ultimate Boot CD could not unlock your drive
Knoppix Live Linux CD maybe your answer.
It should read all drives download a cd image and burn to disk
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html