Reinstalling xp pro and external hard drives

Left external usb hard drive attached when reinstalling XP Pro.

XP pro install marked external HD as unavailable. Western Digital diagnostic indicates drive media is OK.

Problem: How to reverse "unavailable" to available?? Western Digital has not responded and neither has Microsoft. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Welcome, jefco!

Would start > control panel > administrative tools > computer management > disk management and see what you can do there with the external disk attached and powered up. Let us know how it goes.

 

Win XP and external drives

Thanks for the suggestions!
I had to uninstall System Mechanics v7 trial version which was causing
firewall problems. XP started to have problems so I decided to reformate
partiton D: and re install XP. I have WinME in C: drive and used Power-
quest Partition Manager to enlarge drive D:\. All partitions are formatted
with FAT32 including Western Digital external USB 160Gb HD. Under WinME
everthing worked well until I used WinXP disk in CDRom to reinstall XP.

XP wanted to delete WD Ext USB external HD and I had to restart the
install over about 4 times. I should have disconnected the USB before
trying to reinstall XP but Microsoft doesn't mention that anywhere.

XP finally installed in partiton D:\ but had wiped external drive's MBR
and marked it as unavailable. Disk Manager couldn't help. Using WD
diagnostics showed data on external USB, but neither drive C nor D
has USB rivers for USB HD. Installing WD usb drivers under ME & XP
has both OS recognize USB was there but MBR was trashed.

OnTrack has the DataRecovery program which produced recovered
99% of the data on USB HD. Full recovery will take 3-4 days but at
least I going to be able restore all data.

No more nasty surprises from Microsoft. Again thanks for your help.

JEF

 

Never tried on a USB hdd ,but TESTDISK will rebuild the partition table on internal hdds and should work. www:testdisk.com