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External Hard disk enclosure

T

The Green Bean

Diamond Member
So I bought one today, installed a hard disk and turned it on. The drive got detected but did not show up in explorer. Then all of a sudden, the hard disk wont spin and its not getting detected at all. I get a red LED when both the IDE and power sockets are plugged into the disk. When only one is, there is a green light showing that the enclosure is detecting that the HDD is receiving power.

I did try another disk and it has the same problem.

:|

Edit: So I bought a new enclosure. Now the drive turns on and is detected as a USB mass storage device and as a "disk drive" . But I see nothing in explorer or in disk management. It also does not show up in Finder (Mac os x) but is detected as a USB MSD there as well.

edit 2: The smaller 40GB works fine. 200GB does not.
 
Try...>Control Panel>Adminstrator Tools>Administrator Tools>Storage>Disk Management (Local)

There you can "initialize" the drive and format it so your computer will see it.
 
Please clarify - does this external enclosure have its own power supply and cord?
 
Originally posted by: corkyg
Please clarify - does this external enclosure have its own power supply and cord?
Click to expand...

Yes it does have its own power pupply and cord. I have tried two different HD disks and both have the same problem.
 
If you tried two hard drives and they both did the same thing, chances are the enclosure is bad. Do you know if those two hard drives are actually working? Have you tried connecting them directly to your motherboard's IDE port? Check to see if they're recognized that way, if they are, you can conclude that the enclosure is bad.
 
Originally posted by: Nocturnal
If you tried two hard drives and they both did the same thing, chances are the enclosure is bad. Do you know if those two hard drives are actually working? Have you tried connecting them directly to your motherboard's IDE port? Check to see if they're recognized that way, if they are, you can conclude that the enclosure is bad.
Click to expand...

I pulled the 2nd drive out from a perfectly working PC just to check that. Thanks and I will try to get the enclosure exchanged for a working one.
 
Possible issues:

1) Really old IDE-to-USB translator chips can't handle drives larger than 137GB.
2) IDE drives must ALWAYS be set to "Master" on the drive jumpers. Beware of Western Digital drives, which have confusing Master/Slave/Single Drive combinations. If you don't get the right jumper combination, it won't work right.
3) The ORIGINAL Windows XP version (before SP1) can't properly handle drives larger than 137GB.
4) Drives must be Initialized, Partitioned, and Formatted in Disk Management Panel before they will show up in Explorer
5) A warning: Be REALLY careful not to "accidentally" create a "Dynamic" volume in Disk Management. It's NOT the default NTFS setting, but many folks seem to somehow stumble onto it, anyway. It's called "Upgrade the Volume" or some other vague term and is done by CHECKING a checkbox during the partitioning/formatting stage. In Windows 2000, "Upgrade" was, by default, CHECKED, making a dynamic volume the default. This is NOT a good thing.
 
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