External hard drive not recognized

[alzeppelin]

I accidentally assigned the same drive letter to 2 of my external hard drives and now I cannot open up one of them using Windows 7. The drive appears in my devices and printers, device manager and also under computer management but is listed as not initialized. It does not show up under my computer though. I have tried everything even my old XP laptop to re assign the drive letter but the option to do so is never available.

Any help would be hugely appreciated because even though I have multiple backups of everything, the one folder I don't is located on this external.

Thanks in advance!

[xjsb125]

Under computer manager, does one show "offline"?

[alzeppelin]

Shows nothing in the top box and you can only see it below in the horizontal box with a tiny red down arrow next to disc 1 and unknown and not initialized underneath that. I do not see offline anywhere.

[zeptrade]

Sorry to hear. Did you try rebooting with just the HD in question connected. I'm sure you'll get some help from someone who knows this shit.

[alzeppelin]

I've tried every possible solution that I could find on the internet including all the usual recommendations like that one with no luck. Very frustrating.

[zeptrade]

Then you probably found this.

You must be logged on as an administrator to perform these steps.

If you don't like the letter Windows has assigned to a new drive or you want to organize your drive letters in a certain way, you can change the drive letter.

You can assign the letters C through Z to each drive on your computer. A and B are usually reserved for floppy disk drives, but if your computer does not have floppy disk drives, you can assign A and B to volumes. You can see which drive letters are used on your computer by opening Computer.


•
Open Computer by clicking the Start button , and then clicking Computer.


You can change, add, or remove a drive letter by using Computer Management.


1.
Open Computer Management by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Maintenance, clicking Administrative Tools, and then double-clicking Computer Management. If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.

2.
In the Navigation pane, click Disk Management.

3.
Right-click the partition or drive that you want to change, and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.

4.
Do one of the following:
•
To assign a drive letter if one has not already been assigned, click Add, click the letter that you want to use, and then click OK.

•
To change a drive letter, click Change, click Assign the following drive letter, click the letter that you want to use, and then click OK.

•
To remove a drive letter, click Remove, and then click Yes to confirm that you want to remove it.

[alzeppelin]

Yep, found that but it does not give me the option to change drive letter when I right click on it.

[sonofedg]

This is a SWAG (scientific wild accurate guess) try changing the drive in question on a different system running Win 7, local community colleges is a good place. Theory being you can go from Xp to Win 7 but not Win 7 to Xp . . . .

[GRC]

The external hard drive will be a hard drive in a USB enclosure, won't it?

What happens if you take the enclosure apart, take the actual hard drive out, and install it in a PC as a secondary or tertiary INTERNAL drive?

Would that be worth a try?