How is a new drive letter created?

[Han Solo]

I know how to change a drive letter using computer management but the letter E and F are not listed and no other drive is labeled with those letter.

 

[patio]

If they have recently been used or assigned to another device such as a thumb drive or card reader they will not always show as available...
You can however try using refresh off the file menu while in Disk Management to see if they pop back.

 

[Night Hawk]

If you happen to be dual booting with a Windows/Linux setup the VFat partitions are not seen with visible drive letters while some may have been taken just the same. Now did someone say something about removable drives not seeing drive letters?



You'll notice the second active primary is missing one. Or maybe that's from being a ubuntu primary on a usb flash drive for booting live without a cd.

 

[MrNeeds]

yea i found out that linux steals my complete drive and turns it invisible. which kinda annoyed me because it was a 750Gb drive and i needed the space.

 

[Night Hawk]

If you use the version of GParted included with the guided option it will plan out the entire drive even if you have Windows already installed on one partition. The use of GParted live cd and selecting the manual partitioning option will let you edit the root as the "/" mount point without touching the MS primary.

When pointing out where you want Grub installed the root would be selected as well unless you want Grub as the default boot loader for both when dual booting on the same drive. When Linux goes on separate drive you want Grub installed there by selecting that drive rather then ending up seeing Grub trash the Windows mbr.

 

[Han Solo]

Well so far I've been able to recover the letter F but still no E. I think what I have to do is reinstall some drives that I took out and the letters will just reappear.

 

[Night Hawk]

Are those internal drives or ones you plug in like usb or firewire external? There are a few methods for permanently assigning drive letters to plug in devices. How to assign a specific drive letter to the USB drive

For drives and partitions seeing Linux on them there's a free tool for that under the title "How to Access Linux File System from Windows?". Ext2 IFS For Windows

 

[Han Solo]

I was able to recover the letter E, I noticed that my DVD drive was labeled E so I disconnected it and the letter was able to reappear. Problem fixed. As long as we are on the subject of HDDs I been having an issue lately. I have been running Vista Ultimate 64 for some time with about 2 IDE HDDs one of which was allocated as the C drive and another SATA HDD. Everything was working fine until I purchased another SATA HDD and decided to partition that one in order to allocate a C drive (100gb) and the rest at 600gb. When Vista was installed the one IDE HDD was not recognized and computer management would ask to format it. I ran a DATA recovery program but only 200gb of the 300gb of data was restored. How do I restore this data? I was thinking of creating a dual OS in my computer with XP in order to restore that lost data and then place it in the new SATA HDD. Any suggestions?

 

[Night Hawk]

When installing on the new sata did you unplug the ide drive first? As far as Vista is concerned you just added a new drive in if you plugged in back in later making that drive's primary inactive. There are a few things to try now for that.

For simply bailing out on the ide drive you can easily find several freeware type data backup utilities. For direct copy + paste of files and entire folders from drive you can boot up from a live Linux cd like ubuntu or Knoppix which will go right past the problems being seen while booted in Windows.

One option when first replugging a drive back and not available is simply going into the device manager and right clicking on the ide drive in the disk drives section there to choose the uninstall option. Once you reboot after Windows will be forced to detect and reinstall the drivers needed to see that added back in with a drive letter.

 

[Han Solo]

How do I go about using ubuntu? I've never tried that before.

 

[Night Hawk]

The smaller live distros like ubuntu, Knoppix, Puppy, and a few others are probably the easier Linux distributions there to learn. A live cd will go through a slightly different boot process while still reaching a main gui(desktop) that looks a lot like Windows in most ways while the command structure as well as kernels are quite different.

A good starter's reference is seen at Welcome to LinuxMadeEasy | Linux Made Easy When booting from a live cd distro like ubuntu the image here will show how it looks when files are being copied from one drive or partition to another.