Can't access SATA HDD on a Windows 7 Desktop

[JohnnyB_82]

Hello,

I’m having trouble accessing a Maxtor 500GB (DiamondMax 22 STM3500320AS) drive with backup data on it.

A little background: I have an identical pair of these Maxtor 500GB drives which had been installed in a D-Link DNS-323 network storage unit with a “mirrored” drive setup. The DNS-323 unit just up and died on me and wouldn't power up at all, but the drives don't seem to be affected. The D-Link support tech said that the unit stores data in a standard format and is not encrypted in any way, so it should be easily (Ha!) accessible on any Windows machine. I did try the following with both drives and the result was the same.

I installed it in a Window 7 tower and it IS recognized in the BIOS setup, but it doesn’t show up at all in “My Computer”. The tower has an IDE HDD as its main boot drive and the motherboard is an MCP6P M2+ (vers. 6.0) with 4 SATA ports.

When I installed the drive and booted up for the first time, Windows automatically installed drivers and said it was ready to use, but it doesn't show up in My Computer next to the main drive. When I run the Disk Management tool, it does show up there as “Disk 1” and shows three “healthy primary partitions” but it doesn’t have any drive letters assigned to any of the partitions. The main boot drive shows up as “Disk 0” and it's only partition is labeled C:. I did a disk re-scan, as suggested in other posts but it had no effect.

The computer also has a new SATA DVD drive installed which works fine, so I don’t think there’s any problem with the SATA controller. I've tried connecting it to different SATA ports with different power and data cables but the result is always the same. So, the problem seems to be that Windows is just not assigning it a drive letter and I don’t know why, or how to get it to do so.

Can anyone please help me? All of my family photos and videos are stored on these drives. Thanks.

 

[Mark_1970]

You can manually assign a drive letter to the hdd in disk management. then it will show

 

[JohnnyB_82]

Well, I though so as well, but I can't find any way to do that. When I right click on one of the partitions and get the drop down menu, most of the options, including "Change Drive Letter and Path" are greyed out. The only ones that show are "Delete Volume" and "Help".

If I open the Properties window for the disk itself, I get the five standard Property tabs. (General, Policies, Volumes, Drivers, Details)

The "Volumes" tab shows:

Disk: Disk 1
Type: Basic
Status: Online
Partition Style: Master Boot Record (MBR)
Capacity: 476939 MB
Unallocated Space: 788 MB
Reserved Space: 0 MB

Then it lists the three Volumes in the window below and their individual capacities, but does not show a drive letter for any of them the way it does for "Disk 0", which is the C: drive.

I read through the Help files on Disk Management but I can't find anything about assigning a drive letter to a volume other than just right clicking on it and selecting "Change Drive Letter" (which it won't let me do). There's lots of talk about things like changing a Basic disk to a Dynamic disk, Expanding or Shrinking a volume, changing a master boot disk into a GUID, and things like that, but I'm afraid I don't know what much of that means and I'm very afraid I might accidentally delete everything on the disk if I do the wrong thing.

I'm sure there's something simple I'm missing here, or just don't understand about hard drives, and I'm very grateful for any help you might give me on this.

 

[JohnnyB_82]

I did read something in another related post about the RAID settings for mirrored drives, which is how the two drives were setup in the DNS-323. Could this have something to do why windows is not assigning the partitions a letter? The post was about a different issue but it talked about changing the RAID setting to allow them to be accessed. But I think this was for a new drive and they cautioned about it overwriting the boot directory and possibly wiping out any data that had been stored on the drive previously.

Again, I don't know a whole lot about all these different settings.

 

[JohnnyB_82]

Okay, so, for anyone out there reading this, with a similar issue, I was able to access the drives using the free app from the Ext2Fsd Project. (Ext2Fsd-0.68) which I found on the Source Forge website

The link for the latest version is https://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/files/Ext2fsd/0.69/

It's a Windows Driver and App that allows you to access drives that are formatted in ways that Windows can't read. Apparently the DNS-323 was using a Linux format and this little app was able to convert it with a simple click of the mouse and BAM, there it all was, ready to access or copy to another drive. AWESOME! Totally saved my ass.