Expansion drive not showing up in My Computer

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I have a Seagate external hard drive connected to my computer. Last week when I connected it, it worked fine. It showed up as the E drive. When I rebooted the computer, it took over the G drive. There is actually a network drive my computer is connected to that should have that letter. The external drive did work that way. Once I removed the external drive, the network drive worked fine. Now when I have the external drive connected, it doesn’t show in My Computer at all. When I click on the safely remove hardware icon, there is a USB mass storage device with no drive letter listed. I assume this is my drive. Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get my computer to fully recognize the drive so I can access it? This computer has Windows XP Professional.

Thank you.

Trish

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Just try shutting it down and unplugging it from the USB port. Then plug it in and turn it on. You may have to this a few times. It’s a common occurrence with one of my external drives.

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Thank you. I’ll try that.

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Try going into Administrative tools / Computer management/ disk management and assigning a new drive letter (use a high letter such as ‘W’ then drive will always use that number as windows always assigns the next available letter when new drives are put in and would be a long time before ‘W’ would become the next available letter.).

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Thank you! That worked.

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Thank you! That worked.

Your welcome glad it worked for you.
I always use a high letter for external drives so they retain same letter every time they are plugged in. Essential if you have a file backup program running and scheduled. backup.

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I like to give my drives names, as well, so that if I have more than one expansion drive (as I do, as a matter of fact), I can tell Blue from Green (both at the business end and thanks to a sticker on each of the drives).

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Definitely name the drive. That’s the only way to guarantee that you won’t lose track of it again.

Windows is not very good at retaining assigned drive letters, but I find that if I have no drives or devices with higher letters than H, any letter I or higher is usually safe for my external drives. I start that low because I have eight external drives with four partitions each. Obviously, they have to share drive letters, and only four (sixteen partitions max) can be physically plugged in at any one time, but you get the point I think. Because the drives do share letters, I find that naming each partition is essential. (For those who are counting, the lowest starting letter in Windows for 16 partitions is close to I. Windows only allows use of 20 letters, as the other 6 are reserved.)

Some Seagate Expansion Drives have special software or drivers which are recommended to make them fully accessible under Windows. Yours may be this type, especially if it’s large (1.5 TB or larger).

-- rc primak

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Windows only allows use of 20 letters, as the other 6 are reserved.

Windows allows any letter A-Z. There are no reserved letters (unless you happen to already be using them for something else).

Bruce

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Windows allows any letter A-Z. There are no reserved letters (unless you happen to already be using them for something else).

Bruce

Good to know. Maybe things have changed since Windows XP, but the old advice was that only about 20 of the 26 letters were available for the end-user. I’ve never actually run the whole spread on all my external drives (not enough USB ports) so I haven’t tested Windows 7 or Windows 8 on this point.

Usually at least the CD/DVD drive (if present) has an assigned drive letter in Windows. That would be unavailable to the end user. And any internal drive partitions (C: at the least) would be unavailable for USB partitions. We are getting pretty close to 22 remaining available drive letters already.

-- rc primak

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Good to know. Maybe things have changed since Windows XP, but the old advice was that only about 20 of the 26 letters were available for the end-user. I’ve never actually run the whole spread on all my external drives (not enough USB ports) so I haven’t tested Windows 7 or Windows 8 on this point.

Usually at least the CD/DVD drive (if present) has an assigned drive letter in Windows. That would be unavailable to the end user. And any internal drive partitions (C: at the least) would be unavailable for USB partitions. We are getting pretty close to 22 remaining available drive letters already.

XP is no different:

Your computer can use up to 26 drive letters, from A through Z.
How to change drive letter assignments in Windows XP

Bruce

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XP is no different:

Your computer can use up to 26 drive letters, from A through Z.
How to change drive letter assignments in Windows XP

Bruce

You obviously did not read or did not believe my statement about how the CD/DVD drive, the C: (Windows) Drive and other required components take up drive letters in Windows. The resulting AVAILABLE drive letters are 22.

-- rc primak

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You obviously did not read or did not believe my statement about how the CD/DVD drive, the C: (Windows) Drive and other required components take up drive letters in Windows. The resulting AVAILABLE drive letters are 22.

I did read and believe. But I don’t see how 26-2=22 even if that is a bit closer to your target of 20.

Bruce

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I did read and believe. But I don’t see how 26-2=22 even if that is a bit closer to your target of 20.

Bruce

At least I’ve whittled you down to 24 letters.

I didn’t list all the required devices which take up drive letters, partly because these may vary from one system to another. Both of my laptops come in at about four required drives and devices which take up drive letters. This may or may not be representative of an average home user. I think most home users have even more drive letters which are not usually available for external devices, especially drives.

Be that as it may, my main reason for not using a hub is not so much that I’d run out of drive letters, as that power and other more technical considerations (like required resources conflicts and read/write traffic conflicts) make me very unsure about connecting more than one external USB drive to one USB port. Since as I said, my drives are used for critical backups, I’d rather play it safe. So I never get to test the drive letters all the way out to wherever they may become exhausted or start to overlap.

My USB limitations are not in the number of available drive letters, but in the available (other) Windows and hardware resources, were I to use a USB hub. I believe one USB port only supports a limited data transfer bandwidth anyway, so simultaneous transfers (which I usually do) might suffer slowdowns as well as possible errors. In any event, I just don’t like taking unnecessary chances with my critical system backups.

-- rc primak

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can someone help me please ive tried using my files on my expansion hard drive, i have 3 different players like real player, VLC media player and windows media player but when i go onto my expansion hard drive through the computer and click on the expasnsion hard drive it goes through but it doesnt read all of my files ive backed dated the laptop twice and there is no progress before i started to back date it, it never read it i have never had this problem before it will read now but doesnt read my files it reads about 4 files but there is atleast 100 on it, it isnt blocked up still has massive amounts of GB left, when the expansion shows up in auto windows i click on real player etc to try and get it to read but crashed my computer everytime i do it can someone please help me i cant afford to keep back dating it, it makes my computer incredibly slow much appreciated for anyones help Angela

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Windows only allows use of 20 letters, as the other 6 are reserved.

I don’t think that’s correct. For example, Windows certainly doesn’t ‘reserve’ a drive letter for a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive that isn’t present in the system (think Netbooks), though it will assign one if it finds one present (and as with hard drive partition letters once assigned the letter will be ‘sticky’ unless the drive disappears and its letter gets assigned elsewhere). And you can change the letter of a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray drive the same way you can change any hard drive partition’s letter save perhaps for the ‘boot’ and ‘system’ partitions (at least in earlier Windows environments – my impression is that Win7 and perhaps Vista may tolerate changing those partition letters as well, and even in earlier systems the ‘boot’ partition could wind up as a letter other than C: depending upon which partition you chose to install the OS in – e.g., mine is usually D: in XP and Win2K environments and I’ve seen it as high as F: when I forgot to manage partition visibility as I meant to).

Even the traditional floppy drive letters (A: and B:) can be used for other removable drives if no floppy drive is present (and perhaps now even if a floppy IS present), so in a system lacking a floppy drive where the boot and system drives are the same partition you do, in fact, have the other 25 drive letters available to assign pretty much as you please (and perhaps in recent Windows environments also the 26th drive letter to change as you please).

Older Linux systems were limited to using 15(?) partitions per physical drive, though obviously not due to a paucity of letters in the English alphabet. My vague recollection is that pre-NT Windows systems may have had something like the 20-partition limit you mentioned, but (again) not due to letter constraints but rather to those of their internal memory structures (I may be talking early DOS systems here – it’s been a long time since I had to think about it).

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Not enough USB ports? Hubs are cheap – why not run ’em all and see what happens? I have one old computer with an internal Zip drive (obviously Z is reserved for that), a Travan tape drive, and 2-1/4 floppy as well as CD/DVD. No SD and all its relatives, I’m afraid, but I did have 5-1/4 floppy in its day, and lots of PCMCIA and other slots. If it’s a desktop and you want to add ports, be sure they’re USB3 and if you have any spare SATA drives you can get USB3 enclosures, which are very inexpensive. I think I paid $30 each for a 2-port USB3 card and an excellent 3-1/2 SATA HDD enclosure c/w fan. Maybe you can’t get anything but USB3 now, but it is faster.

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Not enough USB ports? Hubs are cheap – why not run ’em all and see what happens? I have one old computer with an internal Zip drive (obviously Z is reserved for that), a Travan tape drive, and 2-1/4 floppy as well as CD/DVD. No SD and all its relatives, I’m afraid, but I did have 5-1/4 floppy in its day, and lots of PCMCIA and other slots. If it’s a desktop and you want to add ports, be sure they’re USB3 and if you have any spare SATA drives you can get USB3 enclosures, which are very inexpensive. I think I paid $30 each for a 2-port USB3 card and an excellent 3-1/2 SATA HDD enclosure c/w fan. Maybe you can’t get anything but USB3 now, but it is faster.

External USB drives often require the entire USB port, among other reasons, because the portable drives need all the USB port’s available power. Using a hub with more than one USB drive attached is asking for trouble, in my experience. Read/write and file transfer issues have resulted, or the drives simply were not recognized by Windows in some cases. My backups and archives are too valuable to mess around with this way.

-- rc primak

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True, if the devices aren’t there, the drive letters become available. I was only referring to more traditional laptops and PCs, where there generally are optical drives and such devices present. I don’t think I meant to imply that the limitation is inherent in the Operating System (at least not since Windows 2000). In any event, my own limitations are the USB ports, the fact that using a USB hub is not a good option for me, and the fact that my own laptops do assign drive letters to certain devices.

By the way, modern Linux doesn’t make as many partitions as the older versions used to do. (Linux used to use Partitions much the way Windows uses Folders.) And as far as I know, the 15 partition limit is ancient history in Linux. Not being a Linux user, I may be wrong about this. But in any event, we’re talking about Windows here, not Linux. Windows may also have a partition limit, but here we’re talking about assigned drive letters.

Without assigned devices, a Windows Ultraportable or Tablet could well have all 26 drive letters available. This helps me not one bit.

Even though the letters A and B may be available, I’m not sure it would be wise to use these letters for external drives. I just have a feeling some software or OEM drivers might have an issue with this. Maybe not — but why take the chance?

-- rc primak

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