Unable to mount fat32 partition in XP

I did some searching on this in the forums and found some posts, but none really seemed to answer my question.

Basically I have a customer who is having me reload their system from the factory recovery cd's. Before I go into that process she wanted me to backup her data. She is running Win ME and obviouslly the partition is FAT32.

For all data backups I do, I pull the hard drive from the customers machine, put it in my FW enclosure and hook it up to my server. In every instance the partition(s) mounts with the next available drive letter(s). However, today an odd thing occured. The partition did not mount. Disk Management picked up the drive, showed a healthy 20gb partition, but I could not assign a drive letter.

So, I decided to physically put the drive onto one of my IDE controllers. Same thing...

I then proceeded to go into Disk Management now that the disk was hooked up to my IDE channel and set it to a DYNAMIC disk. As soon as I did that I was able to right click on the partition and assign a drive letter and then access the data without trouble.

Can someone explain to me what the possible cause of all this is? This is the first time I have ever dealt with this issue on a FAT32 partition.

Thanks,
Scott

 

use linux