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Q: My old computer died (Motherboard). I need the files off the harddrive (c). Backup was on d: and it went down same time as motherboard. C drive is now installed in “Smart Drive” external box. My laptop can “see” the drive but no drive letter is assigned. What do I do to get the drive so I can see it. Did the whole Disk Management thing. All options except for Format are greyed out. Disk Management sees the drive with two partions, both, “Healthy, Active”. Explorer can’t see the drive.

– Larry T.
Destin, Florida

A: It’s always a pain when things that are supposed to simply plug together and automatically work, well, don’t.  There are so many hidden configurations, settings, drivers, and other stuff that we just take for granted when things are working.  Unfortunately, if one or more of these things is misconfigured or goes wrong, it can result in a failure that provides no clue how to fix it.  With a little knowledge, it’s often not hard to overcome the problem, but I dislike giving out advice regarding hard drives that contain critical information via the column.  There is an unfathomable number of combinations of hardware and software out there, and so not one answer that is necessarily “right” and certainly not right for everyone.  So, before anyone begins to try and work on a hard drive based on this advice, I want to remind you up front that all advice provided by It’s Geek to Me is AS-IS, without any warranty or guarantee, and you are accepting all the risks by following or otherwise using this advice.

It sounds to me like there is a partitioning problem with your drive.  I don’t want to spend a lot of space in the column talking about what partitions are and how they work, so I’m going to refer you to I.G.T.M. Issue #158, which you can view on my website at itsgeektome.co/2010/08/issue-158/.  Now, you said you already “Did the whole Disk Management thing.” but all the options except Format were unavailable.  That is normally indicative of a drive that has never been formatted, but you say it was previously in use.  The fact that Disk Management calls the partition “Healthy, Active” is normal, but it doesn’t mean they will be available to Explorer, since they don’t have drive letters assigned.  So, it’s a shot in the dark, but keeping in mind my warnings above, you could try this:  Click the Start menu, and type “DiskPart” in the search box.  Right-click on diskpart.exe, and select “Run as administrator” from the context menu.  You’ll get a command window with the text-based DiskPart utility running inside of it.  Remember that after each of the following commands, you must press [Enter].  At the prompt, type “list volume”.  You will see a list of all drives currently attached to your computer, and in that list, you should see the partitions on your external drive, except they should not have any drive letters showing next to them.  Type “select volume n”, and replace “n” with the volume number shown for the partition you wish to work with.  Type “assign letter z” and replace “z” with the drive letter you want to assign to it.  To avoid any confusion, be sure and choose a drive letter that’s not already assigned, and don’t try to use A or B.  Select the other partition and repeat the process.  When you’re done, type “exit” to leave the utility.  Please write again, and let me know whether this works for you.

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