External Hard drive

[dave154304]

I had a customer bring me an internal hard drive in one of those "make and internal HD an external" boxes you can buy. However, when you plug the USB cable in, his PC will not recognize the drive. I've tried it on some of my PC's with no better luck. He claims no drivers/etc came with the internal to external converter box. Any thoughts on what else I might have to do?

The internal drive is simply mounted in the box, there's power running to it from an outside source (the wall), and a USB connection. My PC recognizes other external hard drives - is there something I must do to make this work?

Thanks in advance...
Dave

[Irish Shark]

What kind of external box is it?

[Gabriel]

Hello Dave,
What OS do you use?
if it is win9x (incl. ME) there is no native support for removable storage (that has to have a driver).
Also, try to see if the USB port is working (by attaching something else to the port).

last idea - try this
http://www.usbnews.net/news/drivers%...enclosures.htm


Cheers,
Gabriel

[dave154304]

My customer is running Win2000 - I tried it on an XP computer too...still no luck.

I know the USB port is working - it works with other devices.

The hard drive is a Maxtor - 160GB drive. Prior to this, I've only worked with external drives that were designed to be external. That's why I was thinking there is something special I have to do to make this one work...

[slgrieb]

Did Windows detect the enclosure when it was first plugged in and attempt to install drivers for it? If not, bad device.

[dave154304]

If I remember right, it did try to install drivers (the window came up saying a new USB device was detected). It just didn't show up in Explorer as a drive.

[Ferrit]

Harddrive is a harddrive.
They arent designed specifically to go into an external box.
I have USB and firewire external boxes all over and none had to be special harddrives.
I also have a Landrive which is a Ext harddrive enclossure which runs directly off a cat5e cable.
Same thing, any harddrive can go in there.
The issue may be that the external box is just flakey. Intermittent detects.
Seen that in a number of External enclosures

[Ahcoraj]

Make sure the harddrive is set to Master, or single, (depending on brand) Slave and CS often don't work in enclosures....

Then check Disk manager to see if it sees the physical, but not the logical drive. Let me know what you find......