Rosewill Drive Not Recognized on Win XP / Lenovo R400

brennajomac

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Mar 19, 2009
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My Rosewill external USB hard drive is connected to my home PC through a USB Hub, running Win Vista. When I hook up the same way to my work laptop, a Lenovo R400 running Win XP, it says it is installed, it shows up in Device Manager (without a drive letter assigned), but doesn't show up in My Computer at all. Have searched and searched all kinds of fixes / ideas - none are working. Have tried removing the Hub and connecting directly to the laptop, but still the same thing. Help!
 

brennajomac

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Mar 19, 2009
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More info: In Disk Management, the drive shows up, says "Healthy (GPT Protective Partition)" under 'status', but doesn't have a drive letter next to the disk. When I right click, all the options are greyed out, so I am unalbe to "change drive letter and paths'.
 

brennajomac

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Mar 19, 2009
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UH OH: may have just answered my question, this was the 1st time I noticed the "GPT Protective Partition" verbiage. I searched again and found this on another forum: "Windows XP SP2 does not
support GPT disks. The disks would have be configured as MBR disks, which
would mean backing up all the data, converting the disk to MBR( the convert
process erases all the data), then restoring the data." What a mess. Any way around this given that I don't have a way to move the data off the drive without buying a new drive now?