I think that basic drives don't need importing and a drive letter is automatically assigned when XP boots. But because I had previously upgraded the drive to a so-called dynamic volume under XP it did not autmatically appear and therefore I used the disk management tool from computer management...
This problem seems like it must have happened to lots of people, I have seen posts that describe similar symptoms with variations on context. Any way here goes:
Essentially, this is what happened:
I just built a new PC and wanted to copy my files across directly from the HDD (now I wish I'd...