External Hard drive not showing

snaps

I have built a 300gb external hard drive from a western didgital internal hard drive and a hard drive caddy. I have set the jumpers to Master as said in the instructions and installed the USB 2.0 driver. When I plug the usb cable into the port Win XP finds the device installs and says the hardware is ready to use. The thing is when I open up my computer its not there? I have built a few external DVD RW's with the same caddys and using an internal dvd rw drive and have had no problems, But this hard drive is proving a problem? Does the new hard drive need to be formatted? If so how?

angelofdeath

control panel -> administrative tools -> computer management -> disk management -> right click on drive -> format

Heinrich

Right click on <My Computer> then select <Manage> then <Disk Management> Y

You should see your disk there. <Right Click> on it and select <Format>

snaps

Ive done that, Now its not showing on the top part of the box but showing as disk 1 at the bottom. First it was saying offline so I put it on line. In the box next to it it is saying it is unallocated??? I assume no drive letter?

SwampThing

Unallocated? Are you sure you've formatted it? - looks like you've created a partition but not necessarily formatted it yet.

snaps

Its reconising it now but it comes up as 0bytes. I am trying a re formatt now to see if that helps.

snaps

It re formatted fine, Thanks guys. One thing I have noticed is that when I plug it into the front USB ports of the desktop it says the usb device has malfunctioned, please try another usb port etc etc. I plug it into the back USB port and all is fine?

jor el

The front port could be USB1. This happens to me on a PC I have that has a mix of USB1 and 2 ports.

SwampThing

Possibly, more than likely, it a USB 2 device and maybe the front port is USB 1.1. It should be backward compatible, but you never know - check the spec on the enclosure.

snaps

No all my USB ports are USB 2. This is not the 1st time this has happened with those front USB ports!

PauloMN

Happens to me with a new external hard drive I got and on a brand new PC. The PC has a 4-in-1 meda card reader jobbie built in which I think actually runs off the USB controller and gives me drives F:, G:, H: and I:. Now when I plug the external HDD into any of the built in USB ports it doesn't pick it up.

However when I plug it into a USB port on an extra USB controller I installed, it works fine and up pops my J: drive.

Weird thing is if I disable the card reader and plug the external HDD into one of the built in USB ports, then it picks it up. Some sort of conflict between the card reader and the external drive.

Is there a limit on how many "mass storage devices" you can hang off a single USB controller?

wd

I have same problem when i follow steps above it shows disc 1 (which i think is my external drive but right clicking does'nt give me a 'format' option

TIA

W

irlrobins

PauloMN wrote:

Is there a limit on how many "mass storage devices" you can hang off a single USB controller?

maybe there isn't enough power on teh usb controller to run the media card reader and the ext HD?