Can't Access USB External HDD

[Imagebuffet]

My desktop computer gives a chime when I connect one of my external 2 TB USB HDD to it, but it never assigns a drive letter to it. I can even see the drive IDed on the "Safely Remove Equipment" screen, but it is without a drive letter. My laptop is able to access the drive normally and the drive appears to be operating normally. I've tried uninstalling all my USB drivers, which then automatically re-installed on reboot, but this has not changed my lack of accessibility to the drive. Does anyone have any idea what is causing this situation and what I could do about it?

Thank you.

[Rson]

Yes, is your desktop a 64 bit machine? There are some externals that will not work on X64. Mainly seagate.

They had the longest time to work with 64 bit.....there is a patch:

ANNOUNCEMENT: 64-bit OS compatibility now availab... - Seagate Community Forums

[Imagebuffet]

Originally Posted by Rson

Yes, is your desktop a 64 bit machine? There are some externals that will not work on X64. Mainly seagate.

They had the longest time to work with 64 bit.....there is a patch:

ANNOUNCEMENT: 64-bit OS compatibility now availab... - Seagate Community Forums

No, my computer is 32-bit, an old Dell Dimension e510.

Most of my other drives of this type continue to work with my computer. This one and one other my computer can no longer access.

[thaddeussmith]

right click "my computer" and select "manage".

in the new window that pops up, select "disk management" towards the bottom left.

once the drive list appears on the right, select the usb drive, right click it and select "assign drive letter". pick a letter from the available list, click "ok" and you should be g2g.

[Imagebuffet]

Originally Posted by thaddeussmith

right click "my computer" and select "manage".

in the new window that pops up, select "disk management" towards the bottom left.

once the drive list appears on the right, select the usb drive, right click it and select "assign drive letter". pick a letter from the available list, click "ok" and you should be g2g.

Thank you. That resolved the problem.

I suspect that the cause of the problem is that I ran out of drive letters. We get only 26, after all. The problem arose when I connected my external USB flash card reader to the system just before I turned on the external USB HDD. The flash card reader uses 4 drive letters, in addition to the 4 drive letters of my internal USB flash card reader (which often doesn't work, but still consumes drive letters), besides all the partitions I have on my internal hard drives and other external HDDs.