Hello i will try and make this as short as posible

i recently got a new pata 2.5inch drive for my laptop along with an enclosure to put the old one in.

was working fine until i decided to delete the exisiting 3 partitions on it to make one big one

Take note: this external enclosure and another one workd fine on my hard drive b4 and still works fine on my girlfriends laptop.

now i carnt perminitly asign a drive letter to the hard drives, i can asign one but when i reboot they disapear and i have to re asign them again. while i do have a letter asigned the drives do not show up in my computer.

i can access them by going to the computer managment screen - disk managment and then right clicking the partition and clicking open, obviously only while the drive is asigned a letter.

on the same computer i have linux dual booted and the linux can access the drives with out any issues.

this lead me to think that it is somthing to do with the way windows is asigning letters to my external enclosers as both of them dont work.

my usb flash/thumb drive works fine and has a letter asigned to it no problems.

as these drives work fine on other computers and my linux partition it appears that it is a windows xp settings issue or a corupt driver or somthing i just carnt track it down.

things i have tried

deleting partition then formating on the laptop i am having issues with but i get an error somthing about not being mounted and having to restart. - the drive has a letter but not permaninate

i tried editing the registry so that there were no drives apart from c: pre asigned to any drives incase there was a conflict.

i tried deleteing and reinstalling all the USB drivers

i went into linux and removed all the flags off the partitions still no luck

i tried making logical drives no luck

i tried primary partion no luck

i tried manually making the partitions and the formats with fdisk no luck

i tried making the partions and format with another xp machine that worked but still had the same issue i had on my machine carnt permantly asign letter. (works on my girlfriends machine and my linux partition but not my windows xp partition)

i tried asigning obscure letters such as x, m , n, p just incase there were letter conflicts i also tried the common ones such as f: and e:

the only thing i havent tried is puting it through the window maby that will help

any suggestions?

im lost as i said it was working up until a little while ago its realy strange.