Problem with external HDD enclosure

[Burrens78]

Hi, I purchased an enclosure (Acomdata 509) for a drive I had in my old desktop PC. It was a secondary drive that had all my music and photos. I installed it per the instructions that came with the 509 enclosure, set the jumper to master on the HDD, and plugged it into the PC. When I do this, I get a, "mass storage device connected," message on the Windows XP taskbar, but I cannot see the drive mapped on, "My computer. I have the device connected via USB 2.0. This is the second enclosure I have tried of this model, since I returned the first one thinking it was defective. I know it's not the HDD because if I connect it internally, the PC recognizes it perfectly.

Anybody have any suggestions?

TIA

 

[Doh!]

How much data do you have on you hard drive? It takes a while for the drive to become available in the explorer if you have lots of data (especially longer if you have many high resolution photos since the thumbnails have to be generated). Have you waited at least couple minutes to see if the HDD became available in the explorer?

 

[RebateMonger]

Make sure that the drive letter isn't jumping on top of another USB device (like a USB card reader, etc.). In Disk Management, set the drive letter to "U" or something like that and see if it shows up on "My Computer".

 

[Burrens78]

Originally posted by: Doh!
How much data do you have on you hard drive? It takes a while for the drive to become available in the explorer if you have lots of data (especially longer if you have many high resolution photos since the thumbnails have to be generated). Have you waited at least couple minutes to see if the HDD became available in the explorer?

I've had the HDD connected for a couple of hours now, and it still doesn't show up. Is there any chance that this enclosure is not compatible with my HDD (Maxtor Diamondmax ATA133)?

If I go into My Computer>Properties>Hardware>Device Manager, under Disk Drives, I can see, "DMI 6Y080P0 USB Device."

 

[jackschmittusa]

Does the drive need to be formatted as FAT32 to be read in the enclosure?

 

[Doh!]

Originally posted by: Burrens78

I've had the HDD connected for a couple of hours now, and it still doesn't show up. Is there any chance that this enclosure is not compatible with my HDD (Maxtor Diamondmax ATA133)?

If I go into My Computer>Properties>Hardware>Device Manager, under Disk Drives, I can see, "DMI 6Y080P0 USB Device."

It could be bad WinXP drivers for the mass storage device or another faulty chipset in the enclosure. Can you try the HDD at another PC? That will rule out the WinXP drivers.

 

[Doh!]

Originally posted by: jackschmittusa
Does the drive need to be formatted as FAT32 to be read in the enclosure?

No. You can format it as NTFS.

 

[Burrens78]

OK, my laptop was finally able to see the drive, after I changed some settings in Disk Management. The thing is that only one of my three partitions is showing up. Are external drives only limited to one partition?

 

[marulee]

Originally posted by: jackschmittusa
Does the drive need to be formatted as FAT32 to be read in the enclosure?

I thought this too for my case and I am convinced as much as OS suggested for it to get formatted before any types of action. XP recommends or perhaps restricts the partitions to be only FAT32 mode on particular external enclosure. Crap.. Aw yeah... now claps dude.