Internal HDD converted to External HDD

Hi, I currently have 2 HDD's

1 - Western Digital 640 GB (SATA), partitioned into 450 GB and 190 GB
2 - Seagete 160 GB (IDE), paritioned into 100 GB and 60 GB

When I installed windows 7 (fresh install), all four partitions were recognized properly. Though the drive letter assignment was a little weird, I left it as is since that was the default assignment.

WD 190 - C:
WD 450 - F:
SG 60 - D:
SG 100 - E:

Now I took out the Seagate Drive and placed it in an external enclosure. When I plug in the external casing to the USB port, the installation would take a very long time, and when I go to Explorer and go inside the drive, explorer would crash.

I tried this on my other computer running win XP and it loaded fine. I also tried it with my sister's laptop also running Win7, initially it took a long time to install, but after that, it also loaded properly.

Is it possible that the problem is because the harddrive was there when I installed win7, then when I removed it, there was some sort of problem with the mappings or something (sorry about this, I'm not familiar with harddrive mappings/disk management, I'm just guessing that it could possibly be the cause)

My PC's specs:
Win7 Desktop - E5200 (2.5GHz), 2 GB DDR2 Ram, P5QL-Pro (P43 Chipset)
Win XP Desktop - Pentium 3 (733), 512MB Ram, no idea about the motherboard. hehe
Win7 Laptop - T4200 (2.0 GHz I think), 1GB Ram


Thanks!

what kind of external enclosure.

ken

Originally Posted by zigzag3143

what kind of external enclosure.

ken

I think its a generic External 3.5" case for HDD's. There's only "3.5 inch USB 2.0 HDD Enclosure" (or something like that) written on one side of the case.

you should be able to force the drive letter assignments so that the usb drive is last HD on letters to avoid any issues using "Admin tools / Computer Management / Storage / Disk Management" snap-in tool

Originally Posted by Highwayman

you should be able to force the drive letter assignments so that the usb drive is last HD on letters to avoid any issues using "Admin tools / Computer Management / Storage / Disk Management" snap-in tool

Ok, I'll have to try that out this weekend ( I only go home during the weekends, and that's where the PC's are.) I'll post again after testing. Thanks!

Hi again, I was able to re-map the drives to the last letters and it worked. The load time for the external harddisk is significantly faster now. Thanks for the tip Highwayman!

Originally Posted by schlitz1231

Hi again, I was able to re-map the drives to the last letters and it worked. The load time for the external harddisk is significantly faster now. Thanks for the tip Highwayman!

Anytime