Computer won't recognize external drive

January 21, 2006 9:51 AM

A little help please in getting my computer to fully recognize an external hard drive.

I recently pulled a drive out of an old computer and purchased an external USB enclosure to use it with my new one (running XP). In the old computer, the drive was a second hard drive for personal files and was set as slave. The manual for the enclosure says to set the drive to master, which I did. When I plug it in, the drive is detected and shows up in Device Manager; however it doesn't show up in My Computer or Disk Management. Removing it using the little green arrow in the system tray also doesn't work as I get the hour glass and then have to re-boot. Attempting to uninstall the drive in Device Manager also causes a freeze.

I've tried setting the jumper to slave and that didn't work. Also tried hooking the enclosure up to a new computer and got the same result. Lastly, to make the drive was still OK, I installed it back in the old computer internally as a slave and it worked perfectly fine.

Should I assume the enclosure is defective and send it back or am I doing something wrong?

posted by gfrobe to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Hmm, doesn't sound promising.

The only other thing that comes to my mind is to remove the jumper altogether (some drives support a "single" configuration for a drive with absolutely no companions), or to try cable select with the jumper.

I'd be surprised if it solved your problem, but it'd be worth a try.

Do you have access to any Linux or Mac machines? If it didn't work on those, as well, you'd be pretty damn certain it was hardware.

It should just be a matter of: put drive in enclosure, put jumper to master, hook up drive power, hook up drive IDE cable.

Is the IDE cable in the enclosure keyed? Newer ones generally are, but if your cable is not keyed, it is possible to put the IDE cable on backwards. Make sure you have pin 1 on the cable going to pin 1 on the drive (pin 1 is red on the cable, and pin one is marked on the hard drive IDE connector somewhere, usually on the printed drive markings).

If you've done all that, and tested different machines and the original connection, it's probably the enclosure being bad.
posted by teece at 10:14 AM on January 21, 2006

I've tried it without the jumper on it, which essentially sets it to slave and that didn't work. And IDE cable is so short it can only possibly go on one way and still have the power cable and screws line up.

Thanks for the advice. As you say, looking like it's a bad enclosure.
posted by gfrobe at 10:37 AM on January 21, 2006

Is the internal drive partitioned at all? I have an external hard drive that I partitioned (so I could use it with Win98), and none of them show up in My Computer. Tech Support said that it was because the computer can't mount multiple drives over one USB.
posted by MrZero at 2:53 PM on January 21, 2006

Just as a followup to what teece said -- the easiest way to find PIN 1 on a drive is to plug the red wire in closest to the power plug. Works everytime.
posted by coriolisdave at 3:40 PM on January 21, 2006

MrZero: Tech Support said that it was because the computer can't mount multiple drives over one USB.

That could be a limitation of Win98, but I've used a partitioned drive in a USB enclosure under XP with no problems. It automatically assigned separate drive letters to each partition.
posted by Pryde at 5:54 PM on January 21, 2006