External HDD problem

steveland?

Hey,

Firstly some history:
I recently broke a HDD mp3 player i had (an XCLEF 20gb HD500) and apparently the hdd arm is bent or something.

Anyways, i bought a new 2.5" internal laptop hdd (this is the kind of hard drive the player uses) to replace the hdd in the mp3player.

One of the big selling points was that the XCLEF is basically thrown together from parts you could buy yourself in a good electronics store and you can easily replace the hard drive with any 2.5" hard drive with a 9.5mm clearance.

So i bought a new hard drive (was thinking of goin for an 80gb or something but some fiscal issues came up) and also an external USB hard drive caddy.

Onto the problem:
When i plug the hard drive into the caddy and then the caddy into the pc it recognises as a USB Mass Storage device. All well and good and i can use the safely remove hardware button and everything.

Only thing is the hard drive doesnt show up in my computer even though its being recognised as a new drive.

Does anyone else have experience with external hdd caddies and know how to make them work?

Thanks for reading such an annoyingly long post,

Steve

skywalker

have you initialised/formatted it yet?

steveland?

I cant format it cos its not showing up in my computer. I have to format it to FAT32 apparently. The only way i know to do that is by opening my computer and right clicking the drive and then format.

Is there another way?

The Muppet

You will have to Fdisk it first to create a partition and then you can format it, You can get an adapter in maplins for about €8 that will allow you put the 2.5 inch drive onto a 3.5 ide connector which is hawhat you have in your pc. That will alow you do the necessary.

steveland?

No ive got it connected to the computer using an adaptor i bought on ebay. Maybe the adaptor's fudged but it's recognising it as a usb drive and says the device is working properly but it just wont show up in my computer.

When i get home from work tonight ill take a photo of the adaptor so you know what im talkin about

The Muppet

SteveD wrote:

No ive got it connected to the computer using an adaptor i bought on ebay. Maybe the adaptor's fudged but it's recognising it as a usb drive and says the device is working properly but it just wont show up in my computer.

When i get home from work tonight ill take a photo of the adaptor so you know what im talkin about

The reason it is not showing up is because the hard disk is not partitiioned and formatted, When you do that you will be sorted.

Sherifu

skywalker and The Muppet are correct in what they have said.
To add, you might be able to avoid getting a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter if your motherboard supports booting from usb bootable drive.
You could then format the new disk with an xp install disk or some other prog.
It shouldn't be too difficult *if you've done formats before
You *should just have to change bios boot order with extern drive attached
I've never had an external drive to test this on my own pc though
Its worth a shot before paying €8 for connector? maybe/maybe not
It's up to you.....

CatInABox

If your using win 2000, then you should be able to do the whole thing in windows. Don't know about XP tho.

Right click 'My Computer' > 'Manage'
Right Click 'Disk Management'
Select Refresh (a new disk should appear in the window)
Right click the new disk and select 'format'
Select 'Fat32' and click ok

I haven't done this in a while so i cant remember all of the stages exactly, but that is the general idea. Hope it helps.

By the way, whats the battery life on that thing?

hulhi

CatInABox wrote:

I haven't done this in a while so i cant remember all of the stages exactly, but that is the general idea. Hope it helps.

QUOTE]

exact steps would be:
right click "My Computer" select "Manage" (or Start-> Control Panel-> Administrative Tools-> Computer Management)
from right hand column select-> disk management -> you should see all your HDDs and CD-ROMs including the new unrecognised one (the one with letter assigned and usually black in color) if it's not there -> right click "disk management" -> rescan disks-> when you see the drive you want-> right click on select new volume-> then just follow the wizard that pops up

RicardoSmith

SteveD

As hulhi and CatInABox have also said. Can you see the drive in Control Panel/Adminsitrive Tools/Computer Management/Disk Managment? It should appear as unformatted drive of the correct capacity. You need to format it there.

Occasionally these drives don't mount correct in USB caddies, due to them being set to master, slave, cable select etc. I used to have a few 2.5 enclourses at my disposal and if a drive didn't mount in one, it would mount in another. Or you might need to reboot the machine, or even download a XP patch for USB support. But since you see the USB drive come up, I'd say you just need to format it in Disk Managment You shouldn't need to mess about with 3.5 adapters, your bios, fdisk or any of that.

CatInABox

I was close enough. If he had any smarts he'd have been able to figure out what i was talking about. Or format his main drive Ah well.

steveland?

Thanks everyone for your help. You've got the drive workin perfectly now



Cheers again

RicardoSmith

Great.

Where you get the XCLEF Steve? What do you think of it. Looks an interesting unit! http://www.digmind.com/store/

steveland?

I got it from www.advancedmp3players.co.uk but they've discontinued selling it now. It's a great little machine but it is prone to breakages.

It's big anyways. Quite heavy. No IPod but the sound quality is much better than the IPod imo.

Still though upgradable hard drive and the firmware is upgraded a fair bit. You can keep up to date with the forum on the advanced mp3 players website where they post the new firmware's.

Anyway yeh its a cool little gadget to have anyways