USB Hard Drive Doesn’t Auto recognize to a Good Drive Letter

My Western Digital 3 TB My Book Essential used to auto recognize to drive P:. Then it stopped auto recognizing and I had to use Drive Management to assign it to a B: drive letter. Within two weeks it failed, and I lost data.

Now I just bought a Western Digital 2TB My Passport and it’s brand new from Newegg. I paid a premium price of $200 total with a 3year Drive Savers Data Recovery Plan. But plugging in this new drive, it didn’t auto recognize to a drive letter D to Z. I had to use Drive Management to assign it a drive letter B:, - I wonder if this is a sign that its already going bad? Should I exchange it?

What happened to you when your external drives wouldn’t auto recognize to a drive letter D to Z? Did your drive go bad?

 

I have had this happen on win vista and win 7 and the drive(s) did not fail. I do not think that the hard drive is going bad. There are some other suggestions if this continues to happen Windows 7 - Notices but does not 'see' external usb hard drive

You could also go here http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?level1=2&lang=en and install/run any available utilities for the drive just to be sure.

 

If you want to try this, you might want to backup your registry or make a system restore point:

1. Open the Registry Editor (Click Start > Run > type regedit).

2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE| SOFTWARE| Microsoft | Windows NT | CurrentVersion | Winlogon| allocatedasd and set the value to 0 (the default is set to 1).

It may also be worth it to update your chipset driver.

 

On my main desktop [Win 7 Pro] when I remount it it installs as a B: drive, even on bootup. On my laptop [Win XP] it booted up plugged and recognized as an F: drive. But one laptop hd had to have it assigned B: drive too.

 

All the time I have assigned drive letters its not a problem with the drive in any of my cases. Simply the drive usually wanted a letter I already gave to something else.