- Mar 12, 2012
- 18
- 0
- 10,510
A few days ago, one of my hard drives (my "F" drive, the letters will be important) suffered a boot sector failure and got converted to RAW format. I bought a new 1TB drive and successfully installed it in NTFS format as my "H" drive. I was attempting to use PhotoRec to recover the files on the F drive with the intention of writing them to the new H drive. I have plenty of drive bays and spare SATA ports in my tower, so this wasn't a problem. However, while trying to do this, I discovered that the H drive had mysteriously disappeared from my system. I couldn't find it anywhere under My PC or in Disk Management.
I opened the case and checked that everything was plugged in correctly, and all seemed to be in order, but on restarting, the H drive was still missing. Next, I checked the properties of the F drive (something I hadn't been able to do previously because it was in RAW format), and then I discovered that my F drive was displaying the drive ID of the new drive I had just purchased, the one I had assigned as my H drive. It was also in NTFS format, just like my H drive.
Confused, I powered down and unplugged the H drive from my case, leaving the F drive plugged in. Then I discovered in disk management that the F drive was back in RAW format. So I swapped the drives out again (unplugging the real F drive and plugging the H drive back in), only to find that the F drive was still showing up in My PC and that the H drive was still nowhere to be seen.
I figured out that the new drive - the H drive - had somehow been given the letter F, so I changed it back to H. Then I unplugged it and plugged the old RAW drive - the F drive - back in again... only to find that the F drive now had the letter H.
In other words, the two drives somehow seem to be linked to the same letter. No matter what I change that letter to, it will somehow affect the other drive even when it's unplugged. If I try to plug both in together, only the "real" H drive (the new one) shows up under My PC or Disk Management (although both show up in the boot menu in BIOS as well as when selecting a partition in PhotoRec). They're plugged in on different SATA cables, so I'm quite at a loss to explain this or know how to fix it. As you can imagine, it's very frustrating when I need to transfer data over from one drive to the other, only to not be able to see both of them at the same time.
Does anyone know what in the world is going on or how to fix this? I want the old, RAW drive to have the letter "F" and the new, NTFS drive to have the letter "H," and for both of them to be visible in My PC and in disk management at the same time. Any ideas?
I'm running Windows 10 (64 bit Professional), for the record.
I opened the case and checked that everything was plugged in correctly, and all seemed to be in order, but on restarting, the H drive was still missing. Next, I checked the properties of the F drive (something I hadn't been able to do previously because it was in RAW format), and then I discovered that my F drive was displaying the drive ID of the new drive I had just purchased, the one I had assigned as my H drive. It was also in NTFS format, just like my H drive.
Confused, I powered down and unplugged the H drive from my case, leaving the F drive plugged in. Then I discovered in disk management that the F drive was back in RAW format. So I swapped the drives out again (unplugging the real F drive and plugging the H drive back in), only to find that the F drive was still showing up in My PC and that the H drive was still nowhere to be seen.
I figured out that the new drive - the H drive - had somehow been given the letter F, so I changed it back to H. Then I unplugged it and plugged the old RAW drive - the F drive - back in again... only to find that the F drive now had the letter H.
In other words, the two drives somehow seem to be linked to the same letter. No matter what I change that letter to, it will somehow affect the other drive even when it's unplugged. If I try to plug both in together, only the "real" H drive (the new one) shows up under My PC or Disk Management (although both show up in the boot menu in BIOS as well as when selecting a partition in PhotoRec). They're plugged in on different SATA cables, so I'm quite at a loss to explain this or know how to fix it. As you can imagine, it's very frustrating when I need to transfer data over from one drive to the other, only to not be able to see both of them at the same time.
Does anyone know what in the world is going on or how to fix this? I want the old, RAW drive to have the letter "F" and the new, NTFS drive to have the letter "H," and for both of them to be visible in My PC and in disk management at the same time. Any ideas?
I'm running Windows 10 (64 bit Professional), for the record.
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