I have taken a 120 gig hard drive from another computer and put it into an external case plugged into my laptop through USB.

The Laptop, running XP, recognises the device and I can drill down to see the drive but no label has been assigned and I can't access the disk.
The disk management tool won't highlight anything so I don't know how to assign the label.

Any suggestions? Would it have anything to do with the disk having been shared on a network when it was in the old computer?

Why do you need to label it? I've never bothered to specifically label physical drives.

The drive has no letter. It doesn't show in my computer and I can't access the files on it. It is visible in device manager under Disk drives, with USB device at the end of it but when I look at the properties and populate the volumes the status says foreign and capacity and all the rest are zero.
I thought I could use disk management to assign a label, E or D say, but I can't access it there either.

In computer management, on the disc management part have you tried right clicking the drive and assigning a drive letter from there ?

Yes tried that, It doesn't give me the option.

I'm assuming that the drive is jumpered to be a slave rather than a master?

I have tried slave and master. Neither work.
The status of the disk is "Foreign" why is that?

Ahh, a Volume Label is NOT the same as a Drive letter. The problem appears to be that the drive is not being properly recorgnized in your CMOS setup. This may be because of a problem with the external case.

If I remember right, some of those external cases actually have drivers that come with them. Did yours come with a cd?

... I'm not expert here but I think I'm having a déjà vu about a similar problem I had with a HD case.. . so please pardon me if not helpful... :o

Thanks for your help guys but it is not drivers or any such thing...
I found the answer, and here is a first, in Windows own Help files...


Foreign

For instructions describing how to fix disks with Foreign status, see Troubleshooting.

The Foreign status occurs when you move a dynamic disk to a local computer running Windows XP Home Edition from another computer running Windows 2000, or Windows XP Professional. The Foreign status can also occur on computers running Windows XP Home Edition that are configured to dual-boot with another operating system that uses dynamic disks (such as Windows 2000 Professional). Dynamic disks are not supported on Windows XP Home Edition or on portable computers. A warning icon appears on disks that display the Foreign status.

You cannot access data on the disk, but you can convert the disk to a basic disk so that you can use it with Windows XP Home Edition.

Warning

Converting a dynamic disk to a basic disk destroys all data on the disk. Do not convert a dynamic disk to a basic disk unless you are certain that you no longer need the data on that disk.
To convert the disk to an empty basic disk, right-click the disk, and then click Convert to Basic Disk.


The old machine was running XP pro, I was cheap and just went for home edition on the laptop. Who knew you couldn't swap drives between them? That seems pretty dumb.

So all I have to do is plug the drive back into the desktop, copy the data off it, reformat the drive (or change it to basic rather than dynamic!? ) with diskmangement while conncted to the laptop and copy the data back. Thank you Microsoft!

Better yet, I can use dskprobe to change from dynamic to basic disc.

http://thelazyadmin.net/index.php?/a...sic-Disks.html

http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=1806

Of course I will still have to put the drive back in the old system to do that but at least I won't have to copy 70G+ of data twice!

Let you know how it goes tomorrow...

Oh yeah,
It worked a charm!
Both those links above give really simple instructions, its hard to go wrong really.