Hi everyone,

My first post here

I am booting up with UBCD4Win on my laptop machine. Once the booting is complete, I then connect my USB external HDD to my laptop. The problem is that even though many UBCD system diagnostic tools do recognise my USB HDD (i.e., they are able to read the drive label), the USB HDD does *not* get assigned a drive letter. Therefore the external HDD remains unusable in this state.

My query is, how do I assign a drive letter from within the UBCD environment to my USB HDD? For a newbie like me, a step by step instruction would be most appreciated

Please note that I could not find compmgmt.msc or diskmgmt.msc to be part of UBCD. If there is something built in into the standard UBCD to achieve my purpose, I would prefer that instead of tinkering with plug-ins etc

Thanks!

Have you tried connecting the USB HDD to the system before you start to boot UBCD4Win?? You may find that it works better this way.

You may be able to accomplish this by going to Programs--->Admin. Tools. The MMC plugin's are there already. I don't have a USB HDD to test with so I'm not sure if you will be able to assign it a drive letter after booting??

Please try a few things and let us know what works.

Hi SteepTrepid,

If I plug-in my USB HDD before starting to boot up with UBCD, then the boot never gets completed (it just stalls after a while). So this is not an option for me. I will try the MMC plug-in though and let you know.

Another query, does the latest version of UBCD automatically boot in to a default screen resolution of 1280X768, or is it still 800x600?

Thanks.

Still 800x600, you can change it in the menu's.

I hope the MMC plugins work for you. If not, I'm not really sure what else to suggest for you. One of these days I'll get a USB HDD so I can play more and figure things out.

BTW- Welcome to the forum!!

A usb hdd should be picked up by ubcd4win upon booting. WinXP supports any USB HDD (I've not seen one which it won't detect).

Are you certain that your USB ports are working?

Is the USB hdd damaged, will it work in another PC. Could be that you need to run chkdsk on the usb drive.

Do you get a BSOD when it freezes?

I've also seen problems on booting the ubcd4win if the pagefile is bad on winxp systems. Run chkdsk on the laptop drive or delete the pagefile (which is a catch 22 situation as you can't boot the ubcd4win to delete it). I can't remember how I got round this, I'm sure it meant disconnecting one of my hdd's but as you have a laptop clearly this won't work. NTFS4Dos I'd try running the chkdsk utility on this floppy on the ntfs drive and see what happens. I'd also run a hdd diagnostic tool on your laptop drive as it may be a sign that it's failing.

OK, I should clarify the scenario a little better.

My laptop has USB 1.1 ports built-in, and they work fine. When I said I connect my USB HDD to my laptop, I do so via a combo USB 2.0-Firewire PCMCIA card (actually use USB 2.0), as this offers me hugely improved transfer speeds over USB 1.1.

As I use my external HDD to store a complete image of my 20GB laptop HDD, it makes more sense to use USB 2.0 to either save or restore this image due to improved transfer speeds. However, when connecting under this combination and booting with UBCD, the boot process starts but does not get completed (no BSOD, just a blank screen).

I suspect that the PCMCIA card is where the issue lies - this is what prevents UBCD from successfully assigning my USB HDD with a drive letter, even though UBCD diagnostic tools *can* read my USB HDD drive label?

I would agree that it's probably the PCMCIA that's causing the problem. I'm afraid I don't have that setup to test out why it's failing to load.

Maybe one of our other forum members may have some insight as to what's causing the problem.

That's exactly why! It's a different hardware device. You need to add drivers for that PCMCIA USB device. What is the model and manufacturer?? Do you have driver files you could send us to take a look at??

My PCMCIA card does not need any additional driver installs when using it within the WinXP SP2 Pro environment.

So how do I go about giving you this information? Do I go to Device Manager with my USB HDD connected, and then try to get this info for you?

Can you look at the PCMCIA card and see who the manufacturer is, the model number and any version number? That would help.

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_in...6140&pfp=SEARCH

The link above takes you to the product page on the CompUSA site, where I got this thing from. The manufacturer is called FMI. I do not have any other info on my card itself.

Thanks for trying to help out!

I have spent a considerable time investigating stuff today. Some discoveries I think might be useful to share:

1. I built a BartPE using Mick Leong's USB 1394 plug-in. Booted up off this CD, and then connected my USB HDD via the PCMCIA card. Presto, all drives instantly show up in disk management window!! The only thing I need to do now is make my drive 'active'. Easy as pie

2. There seems to be a generic USB DOS driver by Panasonic doing the rounds on the internet. Alongwith something called 'Motto Hairu' driver, could this combo be used in UBCD4Win? Just wondering All this is way over my head, so if interested, please do a Google on these terms!

3. Searching this forum suggests that UBCD4Win also uses Mick Leong's plug-in. Then why does it behave differently? There is absolutely no PnP for my USB HDD from within UBCD4Win, but BartPE CD handled my issue brilliantly.

Thanks, and here's hoping this leads on to something better for everyone.

That's correct.

If you compare the plugin\usb\usb.inf files, are they exectly the same? If not then try replacing it with the working one.

Let us know how it goes.

Tom