Prepping Large USB Hard Drives for Vista- how Exactly?

[ahhaa]

So I jammed this Western Digital 250 G hard drive into a USB 2 I/O Magic enclosure, and plugged it into my old XPsp2 machine. The balloons came up saying 'New USB Device / New Hardware Found' and I could see it (not the 2 partitions on it oddly) in Device Manager, which said it was working properly.

Except that it doesn't show up in My Computer or anywhere else that I could actually access it!

I want to use it as a backup&video drive for a Vista laptop, so I'd like to use NTFS for 4G+ files and change the size of the partitions. I downloaded GParted, but can't find any directions for it.

I googled this prob and there are several posts around the web but no obvious solutions

I'd not want to try it on the Vista until I at least know what's the prob here...

[Bjs]

The enclosure may have been found by the new hardware enclosure , but did you setup the drives master/slave/cable pin up correctly .

If not , you found the problem .

[redwudz]

I'm going to assume that's a PATA HDD in your enclosure. Then you usually want to set it to "Master' with the jumpers. SATA drives, no jumpers.

My external HDDs work fine with Vista, both PATA and SATA externals, with USB 2.0, FireWire 400 and eSATA.

One more place you might want to check with XP or Vista is 'Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management>Storage>Disk Management (Local)'. You should see your drive there and it's partitions and status.

I'm not sure how well multiple partitions work over USB, never tried that, but shouldn't be a problem.

[ahhaa]

mmm, so Cable Select is wrong, eh? Its an EIDE parallel drive; Red if you gave me 3 guesses Master woulda been the 3rd!

[redwudz]

The 'Master' setting is only used for the enclosure hardware. The computer will just see it as a drive. That may not be your problem, but I would try it.

[AusTaylor]

I think you need a 500GB SATA with USB HDD enclosure.

One of the following may help u ^^
for enclosure:
http://www.microwarehouse.co.uk/catalogue/item/A0219288?cidp=Shopzilla&utm_source=shop...utm_medium=pcc
http://www.cross-mark.com/esata-external-sata-case-enclosure-p-815.html
http://www.amazon.com/Irocks-Aluminium-3-5-Enclosure-Sata/dp/B000QHKATI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=...8049526&sr=1-1

for hard drive:
http://www.amazon.com/Iomega-Desktop-Drive-Hi-Speed-External/dp/B000HI9O5W/ref=pd_bbs_...8049680&sr=1-1
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148231R