Strange external hard drive issues. Okay, theres a lot of explanation here before getting to where Im currently up to. To begin with, heres what Im using HP Pavilion G7 laptop Intel Core i. M CPU 2. 4. 0GHz 4. Changing External Hard Drive Letter Windows 8' title='Changing External Hard Drive Letter Windows 8' />GB RAM 6. OS, Windows 1. Home. Up until about five days ago, I had a Seagate Expansion 4. TB portable hard drive plugged into it, filled with nothing but music and video files and their respective folders. Of the 3. 6. 3TB available space on there, I had 1. GB remaining. It had been working fine for about four months. Five nights ago I added another 1. In Windows operating system since Windows Vista, if for whatever reason the drive letter or paths assignment to a disk drive, CD or DVD drive, flash memory disk drive. Technology keeps you connected everywhere you go, helps you capture every moment makes your life a bit easier stay uptodate with tips tricks from eHow. How To Change The Drive Letter For Your Hard Drive Change Driver Letter Path Windows 7 Duration 521. TipsNNTricks 19,621 views. This article is a complete guide on recovering your hard drives factory capacity. At the end of this article there is a link to our program that recovers factory. Heres how to change drive letters in Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, or XP. You can change the letter for any drive, except the one Windows is installed on. Changing External Hard Drive Letter Windows 8' title='Changing External Hard Drive Letter Windows 8' />I got an IO error message, followed by a fatal error message. Not knowing what else to do, I restarted the computer. On booting up again, the hard drive was recognised I could access it, I could see all of the files in their correct folders, but actually running any of the video files resulted in a lot of buffering. I ran a sector check, a virus scan, the defragger and chkdsk using CMD, all coming back saying everything was fine. I tried changing the caching policies as suggested elsewhere, but this did nothing either. I thought Id try and copy some files over to another drive so at least Id have some semblance of a working video library, but it turned out the transfer rate was ridiculously slow like an average of 3. This lead me to think it was a USB problem. Changing External Hard Drive Letter Windows 8' title='Changing External Hard Drive Letter Windows 8' />Tried the device in the two other ports I have, same with each of them. I tried other devices in the same ports and they were all working fine, so I thought Id try using a SATA to USB adaptor. The adaptor arrived this morning, so I dismantled the Seagate casing and connected it up. The device connected sound played, but there was nothing in My Computer to suggest that it had been recognised. Device Manager and Disk Manager both saw something was there though Disk Manager said that it was there, with 1. When I right clicked to try and assign a letter, all of the options were greyed out. Fearing that Id lost all of my data, I connected through USB once more. Follow these steps it might work for you. Works for windows Vista788. Might work for windows XP as well. Do try and give me the review for windows XP Step 1. After about twenty minutes, the drive was recognised and everything was in there as Id left it. So once more, I thought Id try the SATA adaptor again, but with some more patience. Connected it up, left it for over an hour and I got the same results as the last time I tried it, so it was back to USB again. My only remaining theory is that theres just too much stuff on there for it to cope with, so currently I am transferring just over 1. Download The Hobbit 3D Trailer Games more. If anyone has any suggestions Id be happy to hear them even if its something as simple as the SATA adaptor being at fault Its the data Im more concerned about rather than the actual hard drive they can be replaced easily enough but Ive been building up this video library for close to ten years now I tried connecting the adaptor on its own, without a hard disk and it was recognised as an empty drive, oddly. The exact adaptor is a Sabrent 2. SATA Hard DriveSSD To USB 3.