# Hard drive not accessible



## Norfolk Lad (Mar 11, 2012)

JIM, this is probably one for you.

I got my new computer yesteday and have been trying to transfer all the data from my old one.  I then discovered that my WD 2 terabyte drive was not shown in the list of drives in "My Computer"  If I go to Disk Management, it shows me three discs as follows:

Disc 0 containing drives C, E and G (it being partitioned so that the OS is at C and E is separate usable space.
Disc 1 which is drive D
Disc 2 which is the WD 2 TB drive has no letter assigned to it.

If I click to update path and drive letter in Disc Mnager I just get a message to teh effect that the information is out of date and to click refresh.  If that does not work, close and reopen disc manager and if that does not work switch off and reboot.  None of them works.  I even tried switching off, disconnecting the disc and rebooting then switching off again and reconnecting the disc.  Still no joy.  The disc shows up as being there but is apparently inaccessible, which is a big nuisance as that is where i want to put all my data and I have had to put it temporarily on a 500Gb drive.  

I hope someone can help.


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## clee01l (Mar 11, 2012)

Are any of these drives formated NTFS? and where they "owned" by another computer/user before being installed in the current device?

Two other points:  I use Paragon tools for HD management .  http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hdm-professional/ This gives me more control over the process than the simple tools that come with windows.  Also, there is no advantage to partitioning a large disk drive in Win7 since there are no longer address limitations in the OS


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## Norfolk Lad (Mar 11, 2012)

Thanks for the speedy response Cletus.   All the visible and working hard drives are NTFS formatted.  This is a brand new PC from PC Specialist ( see my other post in which we discussed the future of USB and DVD drives)) and the drives are also brand new.

I'll have a look at Paragon software ( thanks for the link) but I am not the least bit advanced when it comes to tinkering wiht the guts of the computer!

Jeremy


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 11, 2012)

Jeremy, could you give me a screenshot of the Computer display (Start>Computer), like this:


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## Norfolk Lad (Mar 11, 2012)

clee01l said:


> Two other points:  I use Paragon tools for HD management .  http://www.paragon-software.com/home/hdm-professional/ This gives me more control over the process than the simple tools that come with windows.
> 
> Cletus,
> 
> ...


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## Norfolk Lad (Mar 11, 2012)

Jim,

Cletus beat you to it.  And I can't figure how to capture a screen shot so if you have a moment tell me how.  I thought you just pressed the "Print Screen" button but that does nothing  even in combination with Ctrl or Shift.

Interesting how you set up your hard drives and you have separate drives for LR cache (as did I on the last machine and will again) and LRcat.  I had the LRcat with the main pictures but backups on a separate drive and was proposing to do the same again.  Is it better to separate the catalogue?  I would have it all backed up on an external drive anyhow.


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 11, 2012)

Print Screen copies the contents of the screen to the system clipboard, from where you can paste them into any picture editor, e.g. Paint. For detailed instructions on how to take and post screenshots, see this post from our Tips & Tricks forum.

My hard drive setup was born out of advice I received from this thread in my 'newbie' days (mostly from Brad Snyder). It works fine performance-wise, though I have no metrics that says it's better than different configurations. Logic would say that separating the catalog from the ACR cache from the image files from the system drive should give me better performance than if some of the elements are placed together on less drives.....but I've never bothered to move things around to check the theory. 

All I can say is that I am having none of the performance issues on LR4 which seem to be bothering loads of other folks, but is that down to my particular configuration? Who knows.


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## Norfolk Lad (Mar 11, 2012)

Thanks Jim.


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## Norfolk Lad (Mar 11, 2012)

Jim,

I have now "RTFM" i.e. your instructions in the tips and tricks forum.  Clearly explained there and I hope I remember it for the next occasion.


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## Jim Wilde (Mar 11, 2012)

You don't have to remember it, Jeremy.....you just have to remember where it's located!


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