Hi: I plugged in my Seagate portable hard drive expecting it to be loaded as normal. But it was not displayed in my computer, although it was picked up by the Disk Management utility, by Windows Plug and Plug and Also appears in Device manager. I've tried to manually assign a drive letter but all the options I get is help. My question is this is there anyway I can get access to the drive without using the drive letter or is there anyway I can repair what maybe a damaged partition without losing my important data? Thanks for any help Christian

Hi there ============================================= I assume your external HD is plugged into a USB port and is not formatted, right? In this case you need to do this: Right click My Computer > Manage > Diskmanagement. Here you will see all your Hard Drives, Mass Storage Devices, CD-ROMs etc. And have the Option to add a new Hard Drive. You might see the new unformatted HDD already but no letter assigned, the field white, but the volume in MB should be shown. Here you have the option to create a partition. Next you will have the option to format. Even if you choose not to format, then a Letter will be assigned and “My Computer” will show the HDD as E, F or what ever. Now you can format. Hope this helps. Cheers de Peter ==========================================

Christian, another possibility is that the USB port does not deliver enough power. This happened once to me because I used a 10 ft USB extension cable. When I removed the 10 ft cable it was all ok. Cheers de Peter

13526, if you READ the OP you'll learn that the disk already has data on it. Christian, My guess is it's either 'drive signing' or 'ownership': http://support.microsoft.com/defaul... ===================================== If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2

Thanks everyone for replying-I've just connected another portable hard drive to see what would happen it loaded perfectly so I went into the disk management utility to check it details and a noticed a difference between the two removeable drives the one that worked said Healthy (System) and the one which Im having problems with said Healthy(EISA configuration) I think this the cause of all my problems, any suggestions? Christian

Thanks to everyone, I've managed to fix the problem thanks to your advice. Christian