Windows Explorer won't allocate a drive letter to my new hard drive?

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-- Windows Explorer won't allocate a drive letter to my new hard drive?

Posted by b1_ on Nov-18-2003 08:52:

Windows Explorer won't allocate a drive letter to my new hard drive?

I bought a new 120GB Western Digital Hard Disk Drive (8MB cache). My old WD 20GB HDD has three partitions, C:, D: and E:. I've made my new drive the slave and my old one the master, with the master on the end of my IDE cable, the slave in the middle (the cable I bought actually labels each connection plug "slave" and "master" so I can't get that wrong). My BIOS sees both drives and has designated them Primary Master and Primary Slave. Windows (Windows 98 SE) sees both drives in control manager and reports both are functioning.

The problem is Windows Explorer has not allocated a drive letter to my new drive. Explorer has ignored the new drive. In control manager the new drive has a place to enter a drive letter but I can't type anything in the box - won't let me. My old drive has drive letters allocated but they also can't be edited in control panel - perhaps I need to use partition magic (program I used to partition my old drive) to get windows to allocate my new drive a letter.

On my other IDE cable I have a CD burner and a CD player, so I don't want to use the other cable.

Once I get it working I will ghost my old drive onto my new one.

My system is:
AMD Athlon 1.33 MHz
Epox EP-8KTA3L Motherboard
380MB SDRAM
Windows 98 SE

I thought all I had to do was plug it in and windows would recognise it automatically. In fact I had an old 3GB drive that I had in this same cmputer and it was recognised automatically?

Anyone know what I can do now? Perhaps I need to update my windows 98?

Posted by Disney on Nov-18-2003 10:33:

Looks like you forgot one thing...

FDISK

You need to make partitions on your new HD.

Posted by b1_ on Nov-18-2003 13:05:

I could have sworn that the last time I added an extra HDD it was added automatically, but knowing my memory...

Thx, fdisk was that extra step I needed, although I didn't use it because fdisking with win98se has a problem recognising HDD larger than 64GB. Instead I used Western Digitals Data Lifeguard app specifically designed to set up WD HDD's.

For anyone else who has the same problem here are the links you'll need:

fdisk instructions

Life Guard for Western Digital HDD

Posted by arj1o1 on Nov-18-2003 15:15:

hehe that a simple thing to forget