AKICILJ: External hard drive problem

[carbonel]

I am humming, because I've been through my computer with a hard drive with no name.

To be more precise, I have this new 2 Tb USB hard drive that appears to have been installed properly via PnP, but isn't showing up as a named (or lettered) external drive in Windows Explorer. However, it shows up as a "My Passport" (the WD model) drive -- with no letter -- in the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" dialog box.

And if I open the Devices and Printers dialog box, there are two My Passport drives that both claim to be working properly. The drive letter isn't shown there, so I can't tell which is the problematical one in that screen.

Any idea how to get this hard drive back on track? Rebooting the computer didn't help, and I can't think of anything else to try.

Comments

[spacecrab.livejournal.com]

Try opening Disk Management (which you can get to by right-clicking My Computer in some versions of Windows and choosing Manage, or going the long way as in this link:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/ht/disk-management-windows-7.htm )

In Disk Management, you should be able to see the USB drive listed, right-click on it and assign it a drive letter. Or
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/ht/change-drive-letters-windows-7.htm

[carbonel]

That was interesting -- I've never been there before. And on this window, I can tell which one is the problem drive. It says it's offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that's online.

How do I fix this? Is there a way from here to tell Windows to forget about this disk and start over again? (From the regular Windows disk view, I can't tell which of the two My Passport drives is the problem one, so I'd be just as likely to remove the wrong one.)

[spacecrab.livejournal.com]

Google is our friend -- albeit, a slightly nerdy one:
http://www.howtohaven.com/system/change-disk-signature.shtml

"When I encountered this problem on my system, I didn't know which of my existing disks had a signature that collided with the one that Windows refused to mount (although I had my suspicions). To solve it, I simply disconnected all my external disks, mounted one, used DiskPart to list its signature, noted the signature somewhere, disconnected it, then mounted the next one and repeated the procedure. With this method, I eventually found out which 2 disks had the same signature, and could change one of them to a different identifier. (For the curious, I simply used the example signature given by DiskPart in its "help uniqueid disk" as the new signature. With my understanding of the situation as shaky as it was, I didn't want to risk giving my disk an invalid signature.)"