I have done this a million times and never ran into this. I have an internal storage drive (1TB) which I changed the drive letter. After doing so, I cannot access drive and of course, windows wants to format it.I know there must be a quick way to re-establish the partition and get back into the drive. Thanks in advance for your help.

Testdisk is probably worth a try: http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/Test...

"After doing so, I cannot access drive" What do you mean when you say that? If you can't see the drive letter or the files and folders on the drive, or if Windows tells you it's not formatted, them aegis1's suggestions will probably help. If you CAN see the drive letter and the files and folder on the drive but are getting "Access Denied" messages, that's because some user was using a logon password to access the drive previously . In that case you need to Take Ownership of the data on the drive. How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... NOTE: you probably have to reboot the computer before the settings you change actually take effect!

Thanks for the advise, I will try the test-disk program and see what happens. I have a number of data recovery programs and can see the data is there. I just wanted to see if there was a quick way to get Win to recognize it as a partitioned disk. As I said, when you try and access the drive, windows says drive not formated do you want to format it now.. Thanks again for the assistance

Some more. Glary Undelete: http://glary-undelete.en.softonic.com/ PC Inspector (freeware) http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pcinsp... Zero assumption Recovery http://www.z-a-recovery.com The demo is limited It will only recover 'up to' four folders per run But you can make multiple runs Really good, but you have to pay for it. GetDataBack http://www.runtime.org/ ...... It could also be your hard drive is failing. Check your hard drive with the manufacturer's diagnostics. See the latter part of response 1 in this: http://www.computing.net/windows95/... (thanks to Dan Penny for this link:) Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm... If you don't have a floppy drive, you can get a CD image diagnostic utility from most hard drive manufacturer's web sites, but obviously you would need to make a burned CD, preferably a CD-R for best compatibilty, on another computer if you need to. If the hard drive itself tests okay, any data problems found can be fixed, one way or another.

Thanks Much for the extra info...Hard Drive checks OK so I will try some of the extra links you posted. A few I already own. I was just hoping for a quick fix to make the hard drive's partition readable again.