My father has had a system disk crash but his data disk is fine, he has
obtained a new hard drive and installed windows XP home edition (SP2) - (he
was using XP home edition but don't know what SP). The bios and device
manager see the data drive but no drive letter is specified and the option to
give one is greyed out. he does not want to format the data drive as he has
no up to date back up. Disc management sees it as a 'local disk' he also cant
remember what the file system is

How do I get the OS to give the drive a drive letter - any help is much
appreciated

Try going to run,type:diskmgmt.msc In msc,L.click on the drive,then go to
actions,all,select,make the drive active.Then reopen actions,select "change
drive letter/path,change to listed letter,close out.

"tallguy_uk_98" wrote:

> My father has had a system disk crash but his data disk is fine, he has
> obtained a new hard drive and installed windows XP home edition (SP2) - (he
> was using XP home edition but don't know what SP). The bios and device
> manager see the data drive but no drive letter is specified and the option to
> give one is greyed out. he does not want to format the data drive as he has
> no up to date back up. Disc management sees it as a 'local disk' he also cant
> remember what the file system is
>
> How do I get the OS to give the drive a drive letter - any help is much
> appreciated

Thanks for the reply, unforntunatly it didn't work, when the 'local drive' is
selected the only action available is 'delete partition'

One point I should add is that the original install on XP home was an
upgrade, since then my father has lost his original Win 98 disk so has bought
a full version of XP home to do the install. This wouldn't effect the
recognition or allocation of a drive letter since the OS will have a
different serial number? ( the data disc format is NTFS and he was running XP
SP2)

Thanks



"Andrew E." wrote:

> Try going to run,type:diskmgmt.msc In msc,L.click on the drive,then go to
> actions,all,select,make the drive active.Then reopen actions,select "change
> drive letter/path,change to listed letter,close out.
>
> "tallguy_uk_98" wrote:
>
> > My father has had a system disk crash but his data disk is fine, he has
> > obtained a new hard drive and installed windows XP home edition (SP2) - (he
> > was using XP home edition but don't know what SP). The bios and device
> > manager see the data drive but no drive letter is specified and the option to
> > give one is greyed out. he does not want to format the data drive as he has
> > no up to date back up. Disc management sees it as a 'local disk' he also cant
> > remember what the file system is
> >
> > How do I get the OS to give the drive a drive letter - any help is much
> > appreciated

Thanks for the reply, unforntunatly it didn't work, when the 'local drive' is
selected the only action available is 'delete partition'

One point I should add is that the original install on XP home was an
upgrade, since then my father has lost his original Win 98 disk so has bought
a full version of XP home to do the install. This wouldn't effect the
recognition or allocation of a drive letter since the OS will have a
different serial number? ( the data disc format is NTFS and he was running XP
SP2)

Thanks



"Andrew E." wrote:

> Try going to run,type:diskmgmt.msc In msc,L.click on the drive,then go to
> actions,all,select,make the drive active.Then reopen actions,select "change
> drive letter/path,change to listed letter,close out.
>
> "tallguy_uk_98" wrote:
>
> > My father has had a system disk crash but his data disk is fine, he has
> > obtained a new hard drive and installed windows XP home edition (SP2) - (he
> > was using XP home edition but don't know what SP). The bios and device
> > manager see the data drive but no drive letter is specified and the option to
> > give one is greyed out. he does not want to format the data drive as he has
> > no up to date back up. Disc management sees it as a 'local disk' he also cant
> > remember what the file system is
> >
> > How do I get the OS to give the drive a drive letter - any help is much
> > appreciated