I swapped out my HDD for an SSD in my Win 8.1 Lenovo Y480, replacing the HDD in the optical drive slot using an HDD Caddy. The system runs fine. I still see the original copy of the Windows System disk that sits on the HDD in Windows listed as drive I:, in addition to the cloned C: drive which is booting from the SSD. I haven't deleted the old copy of the System Drive from the HDD yet, in case of errors &c. as I'm still trying the system.
However, when I plug in external USB HDDs now, none of them register with Windows. They are visible to Device Manager and Disk Manager, but they are not being assigned drive letters. They work fine on my mac, but not on this PC.
I get the message at startup saying "Check cable connections" or something. I will reboot and copy that text into another post below.
I'm also going to check the BIOS options, in case I changed some of those options when doing the change over. I can't see the option to save this post until I come back, so I'll just have to append the results in the next post down.
But has anyone encounted this problem, and do you have any suggestions? Thanks!
I may be duplicating this issue soon on my Win 8.1 Lenovo y510p Yesterday I ordered one of those caddies to place SSD or HDD into the ODD space. Until then there were incidents where drive letters assigned conflicted with a newly added internal drive in desktops. Mind you this may move around with which Windows but until I get my caddy and see if same happens, look around for this:
Right click on Computer icon on Desktop > Manage > Double click on Disk management > See if there any unassigned drive exist or not. If exist then manually "Change Drive Letter & Path"
Yes, assigning a drive letter worked temporarily in Drive Manager, but the next time I plugged in, it didn't work. Also, I tried to use a colleague's drive, and it didn't even register with Drive Manager, although it worked in my office's Mac - a FAT 32 drive.
Anyone have any insight into external drives not registering with Windows?
Update. My caddy for my y510p just arrived so later I'll plug that in with some HDD. Next I'll try some USB sticks to see what happens.
There are many prior discussions about USB enumeration and in rare instances having to clean out a certain registry tree to clear the road for Windows to pick a new drive letter.
It's an old issue where say Drive F: was used for the USB stick but the new HDDs use F: and the letter assignment fails on the USB stick later. A trip to disk management usually is the next stop.
However I have a question. Is that asking too much from users today?
Another update. It took a while to remember how I found a drive letter manager (or even that name!) So here's the path I took.
http://www.sevenforums.com/hardware-devices/112479-windows-7-does-not-assign-drive-letters-external-hdds.html then over to http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbdlm_e.html
It's been updated for Windows 8 and 10 so they've been busy. Sorry, still off doing other things but the drive caddy is on my list of things to do.
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