2nd HDD in Win 7, formatted with data, can't assign drive letter

[PatG1]

Hello,
I just did a clean install on Win 7 with a new SATA HDD. All was fine. Then took my old SATA HDD and installed as second HDD, expecting to see the drive and be able to access data and copy to new HDD. Well, that doesn't seem to work.
Old SATA HDD (NTFS formatted in XP) is shown in the BIOS so computer sees drive. Went to Windows Disk Management and Win 7 sees drive as "Disk 1, Basic, 149 GB, Online." It also shows it as "Healthy (Active, Primary Partition)". It does not indicate NTFS or RAW. It shows it as 100% Free (however, I know the disk is full of my data from old build). I right-click on blue bar and only option is "Delete Volume". It will not let me assign a drive letter.

Any suggestions how I can access this drive to copy my data to new HDD? Thanks much

 

[compulsivebuilder]

It may sound counter-intuitive, but consider putting the drive into an enclosure and attaching it via USB2. Windows can get a bit funny about access rights when you are accessing a drive internally, but it gets rather more liberal when the drive is accessed over USB2.

I would suggest putting it in an enclosure, copying the data you want, then putting it back inside the machine, and doing the delete partition / allocate partition that it is encouraging you to do.

 

[PatG1]

OK, I'll give that a try. I purchased HDD recovery utilities and they don't have any problem identifying the disk and accessing data. But they want to recover all my deleted files, which is not my goal.... Thanks much. Pat