[pony321]

I have a WD 1.5 tb drive which is partially filled with files. This drive shows up in disc management as drive H (WinXP). What I'd like to do is move this drive to an external Rosewell enclosure. When I do so disc management will show this drive as missing.

With 1.5tb in the new enclosure but not connected to the pc do I
1) delete the volume (drive H) in disc management
2) connect the 1.5tb to the esata port
3) power up the 1.5tb external
4) in disc management reassign the drive letter?

I just want to make sure I'll still be able to access my data after I make the switch fro internal to external. Thank you.

This post has been edited by pony321: 02 November 2011 - 03:57 PM

[LiveBrianD]

When you disconnect the drive from the internal machine it will not show up in disk mgmt and its' drive letter will be avalible to be assigned to something else. Just put the drive in the enclosure, plug it in. It should show up as a regular HD with all your data, and you should use the 'safe removal' icon in the task bar to remove it.

[pony321]

LiveBrianD, on 02 November 2011 - 04:27 PM, said:

When you disconnect the drive from the internal machine it will not show up in disk mgmt and its' drive letter will be avalible to be assigned to something else. Just put the drive in the enclosure, plug it in. It should show up as a regular HD with all your data, and you should use the 'safe removal' icon in the task bar to remove it.

Thanks. The reason I asked this is I did the same with the WD 300gig 10,000rpm sata3 HD. As soon as I removed it from the pc after bootup I went directly into disc management and the 320 was still listed but with a red X next to it. It also read missing.

Tomorrow I'll unplug drive H and see what happens. If disc management no longer shows the drive then it's pretty straight forward. If disc management shows drive H as missing then this is where I get slightly confused. As mentioned before I can delete the volume in DM and with the 1.5tb drive in the new case hooked up and powered up just reassign the drive back to drive H. Sounds simple but need to make sure.

[LiveBrianD]

Wait, you shut down the PC, removed the HD, put it in the enclosure, booted the PC, and then connected the enclosure, right?

[pony321]

LiveBrianD, on 02 November 2011 - 05:46 PM, said:

Wait, you shut down the PC, removed the HD, put it in the enclosure, booted the PC, and then connected the enclosure, right?

That would be correct when I get to that point. With limited time to work on this pc this is what I did for testing purposes only. I have another HD which is in this pc drive letter M. This is a 320 gig sata 3 drive. I removed this drive from this pc, rebooted, In disc management Drive M was still listed but with a red X and it read "missing". I would tend to think that it wouldn't be listed at all. With the 320gig removed I deleted the volume in disc management then turned off the pc. So with the pc turned off I reinstalled this drive and turned the pc back on. In disc management the 320gb showed back up but was unallocated. I would need to create a new volume which meant I was to lose the data on this drive (no big deal in this case). I would also tend to think that by placing the 320gb ' which has data already on it' back into the pc then disc managemrnt shoud see it as an already formatted hd with data.

[LiveBrianD]

Can you post a screenshot? It might be that your enclosure is going bad.