Hello - forgive me if I've raised this in the wrong forum.
I've seen a few references to similar problems but none seem to address my exact problem.
I am unable to use any of the suggested solutions.

I have a working disc drive , with a working USB / IDE disc box - I've used the box previously with other drives.
This drive is an old C drive I'm trying to copy the data from.

I have attached previous drives to this computer and USB pen drives no problem.
Though currently my pen drive assigns a drive letter but works intermittently when the disc box is attached!

I'm using XP home.

On attaching the USB box - the box is seen, the drive is seen - but no drive letter is assigned.
In disc manager it recognises the drive correctly - but says the drive is working fine - recognises FAT32 but no drive letter.
Heathy online active FAT32.
Under properties the volume is populated.


Right clicking on the drive to assign a drive letter is greyed out.
Using CMD - using diskpart - I can see the disc - but can not assign a letter or a volume.
It is not under list volume.

The disc box is a from startech.com - but I can find no other drivers.
Anyway - its worked in the past on this system with other hard drives.

I also tried attaching the same box to a different XP system - same result.

I'm sure I've had this problem in the past and I need to do something the equivalent of Mount - on a unix system.

Any ideas?

If it comes to the crunch I could just attach it as an extra IDE drive but I wanted the freedom of using the USB box.

Regards Andy