Cant Assign a drive letter to partition

craig20102010 · 24 Oct 2011 at 22:12

a week ago my pc decided to crash and when it finished doing the memory dump etc and restarted my drive e: had gone

been looking through disk management and its there just not allocated a driver letter. iv had to download some software to try and see if i can get access to it any other way as far as im aware everything is there and even using a program called Acronis Disk Director 11 i cant assign it a drive letter.

What could be wrong and what do i need to do to get windows to recognise its there?

im using Windows 7.

cheers

Deception · 25 Oct 2011 at 09:01

In Disk Management, is the option to 'Change Drive Letter and Paths' greyed out when you right click on the drive?

paradigm · 25 Oct 2011 at 09:17

First off, is the disk marked as online?

Fire up an administrative CMD window and type:

diskpart
list disk

This should list all the disks in the machine and show you if they are online or offline. If they are offline, then you need to bring it online before you can assign a partition within it a drive letter. So:

select disk x (where x is the number of the disk you need to change)
online disk

Now take a look at the partitions within your selected disk:

list part

You can try to assign a drive letter to the partition by selecting it, then assigning it.

select part x (where x is the number of the partition you need to assign)
assign LETTER=X NOERR (where X is the drive letter you want to assign)

If this fails then you might have MBR problems, and might need to try something more in depth like a gparted live CD.

craig20102010 · 25 Oct 2011 at 11:39

Sorted the problem now the Disk part didnt work i had to get some other software that sorted out the partition table since that was all magically messed up. decent little program that was freeware and used the CMD to solve the problem all working perfectly now without loosing any data.

cheers anyway guys

cats_five · 25 Oct 2011 at 11:48

Care to tell us what the 'decent little program that was freeware' was?

paradigm · 25 Oct 2011 at 12:55

gParted would have fixed the partition table without fail

Deception · 25 Oct 2011 at 12:56

cats_five said:
Care to tell us what the 'decent little program that was freeware' was?

If it's free and useful, then maybe it can be addedd to the useful apps list

craig20102010 · 26 Oct 2011 at 17:17

Deception said:
If it's free and useful, then maybe it can be addedd to the useful apps list

sorry i was going to mention it last post but i was on the wrong pc so couldnt remember what it was called..

its called though testdisk-6.12 it is a very useful app