Why won't my PC give my new hard disk a drive letter?

I suffered a hard disk failure the other night. :-( I managed to re-animate my operating system from the backup copy I had on the partition, but obviously all my recent files are lost. (I've backed up files previously, but not for the last few weeks). I've put in a second hard drive to recover files from c: to, but the PC won't ascribe a drive letter. I've got a 200GB drive with C: and D: (as the OS backup partition) on a SCSI. There are 2 SCSI ports on my motherboard. I've also got 2 optical drives running as master and slave on one IDE and now I've connected a 320GB drive to the other IDE. I've tried attaching via the master and slave sockets on the IDE and changing the jumpers from factory setting (cable select) to device 1 (slave) and device 1 (slave present). The hardware manager accepts that there is a hard disk drive present, but won't give it a drive letter. It also claims that 'this device is working properly'!

Why won't my PC give my new hard disk a drive letter?
Right click "My Computer" -%26gt; Manage -%26gt; Disk Management. Assign a letter from there.
Reply:you have got to partition the hard drive and then format it, you can do this in disk management on windows XP or Dos or windows 2000,98,95 ect





to do this in Dos download fdisk onto a floppy disk or you can do it from dos itself





C:\windows\Fdisk
Reply:Goto Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Storage - Disk Management


In the bottom pane choose your new hard drive, right-click on the window, and choose 'Change drive letter...' - Change. Now choose a drive letter that will not conflict with your other drives - SCSI or optical. Click OK and you should now be able to see the new drive.
Reply:I would check two things. The first is the BIOS to make sure that it is recognised there, if not you can't use it. If you don't see it in the BIOS, you can get the BIOS to do an automatic search for your your drives. The second thing that I would check is whether the HDD has been formatted or not. From what you are saying, you have done everything that is needed except for the formatting. You will need to format the new disk in the same File System as the old HDD. You can chose a different File System but it makes it far easier if both HDDs are the same, which should be NTFS (New Technonlogy File System) rather than FAT32 as your HDDs are large.
Reply:All this time I've been going to Computer Management via Control Panel! Thanks for the unintended tip TallPaul.

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