External hard drive

[nanz1]

I recently purchased a Western Digital 120g hard drive and put it in a external 2.0 enclosure. My OS is ME and the computer does not recognize the hard drive. When I check to My Computer there is no letter drive showing that its there. Any help would be appreciated.

[play9224]

you'll need to go to start >run and type in "fdisk" to start the Fixed Disk Setup program. Select "Change current fixed disk drive" and choose new usb external drive. After creating a partition for you usb external hdd, restart the system and format the new drive. I got over 400gigs of external hard drives. This should take care of everything.

[nanz1]

I tried to do fdisk and it does not have that option to change current fixed disk.

[dcsos]

BY THE WAY...If the box is recognized, but not the disc,
THEN THIS IS NORMAL

for a RAW hard drive...
The previous suggestion to mine POSTED suggest FORMATING THE NEW HARD DRIVE....THIS UNDOUBTABLY will give it a drive letter if THE BOX IS recognized but the HARD DRIVE lacks a format (RAW)
however:
WINDOWS (any version) cannot see a RAW disc in a USB BOX
that is, NO USB drivers are loaded in windows when you type FDISK...
so IT CANNOT SEE THE DISC EITHER!

the work arounds are two:
1. DONT UNMOUNT ANYTHING: go to western digital site and download a utitlity to allow windows to see a USB raw disc in DOS..(DO THEY MAKE SUCH A THING--i dunno-but you need it)

2. take the disc out of the external box and format it when its attached to the IDE bus of some machine!(preferably the one you're gonna use it in...
put in the boot floppy disc and format the drive with FAT32- when you see it in FDISK succesfully...NO DON"T GO formatting any other drives----be careful---) and TAKE IT OUT and put the HARD DISC back in the external box...Now youll be able to get a drive letter..note that you never need to boot thru to WINDOWS MILLENUIM ---if you formatted the new drive in dos..just turn the tower off remove the disk..windows'll never know what you did since its last boot!


If the disc is already formatted and still doesn't show up:
Try this..
Boot normally, then, swiflty, and correctly, plug in the USB connector of the already powered HARD DRIVE in a swift hot-swap action.
This should bring up the FOUND NEW HARDWARE DIALOG

If not..see If they gave you a driver disc in the package, ALTHOUGH with millenium the drivers for USB storage external should be built in

Then If this don't work..call WESTERN DIG they owe you an explanation..


btw..If you want to reformat in NTFS (not a possiblity if you're running MILLENIUM-but you might in 2000 or XP..just right click the dive and reformat in windows when a drive letter al last comes up )

[nanz1]

I'm so lost on how to do this. I went to the Western Digital site and I'm not really sure what I'm looking for. Any body out there want to help a dummy out and help me through this? I thought that having an external hard drive was going to be easy but I sure was wrong. It was easy putting the hard drive into the enclosure, the hard part is that now I can't get it to work.

[dcsos]

Well WESTERN DIG has nothing on their site for you

so you have to take the drive ouyt of the case and connect it directly to your computer's IDE chain directly ...for one boot with a floppy disc...
so you can fdisk it.

UNLESS SOMEONE KNOWS of a THIRD PARTY UTILITY THAT CAN SEE THE USB CHAIN in DOS..Please Post here..and it has to work with WESTERN DIGITAL BRAND..

and You still haven't posted a single detail about this problem..You didn't say if the DRIVE ENCLOSURE or BOX itslf was recognized by MILLENIUM..how can we help you if you can't post what equiptment you are using in your profile or post?

A start would be to either describe or post a screen capture of your device manager expanded out

[nanz1]

When I open up Device manager it says under disk drives it says there is a 2.0 USB storage device and under hard disk controllers it says that there is a usb mass storage device. Also when you look at other devices there are two unknown devices with a yellow exclamation marks next two them. I would tryt o capture the device manager so you could see the list but I don't know how to do that. Hope this helps.

[nanz1]

Just wanted to correct something on my last post. Where the unknown devices are showing,its not yellow exclamation marks, they are yellow question marks.

[Gazorgan]

It helps to fill out your profile.

Does 98 ME support USB 2.0? or was that 98/98se ?

The easiest way to fix your problem is this.
1) unplug and unit.
2) open it up and remove the hard drive.
3) shut you computer down
4) open it up. unplug the ide cable that's (hopefully) connected to your CDROM and not you main boot drive. Plug in you 120 GB drive (don't forget the power cable). 'Hopefully' you won't have to mess with jumpers and bios settings....3/4 chance maybe. If it's not recognized, go into bios and select 'Auto' for both secondary drives.
5) Boot.
6) open a DOS box
7) type in FDISK
8) say yes when it prompts about larger drives (this enables FAT 32, which you need).
9) go to the bottom option (I'm on W2K, can't walk myself through it) and change drives to you 120 GB. If you select the wrong drive you will lose everything.
10) Create a partition, I think it's option 1 or 2? Use all the space.....wait a few minutes as it completes.
11) Exit and shut down the computer.
12) Re-Boot.
13) In my computer you will have a drive with no letter or a new letter. Right click on it and select properties...it will have no available space, select Format, under options. Format it to FAT32, all spce.
14) When done shut down.
15) put everything back together. Hookup the USB drive and power it up, then boot your computer.
16) everything should work.

[nanz1]

I finally got it up and running. Thanks to all of you for your help. There is on more problem. When I want to stop the hard drive there is no problem but when put it back on I have to keep reinstalling the driver that came with my 2.0 pci card. Why is that?