Trouble with a Western Digital Internal Hard Drive...

[fbird62004]

I bought a Western Digital Scorpio 320 GB SATA internal hard drive to back up some files. I'm trying to use it in an enclosure kit so i have an external hard drive. well i put the drive into the enclosure kit and my laptop installs the drivers. problem is, my computer doesn't recognize that there is an external drive at all. i know that the enclosure works cause i took another internal drive and filled that one up with files (granted the drives arent the same company...). so im just looking for some answers to make it work cause i really want to use this drive.

 

[Specsnow]

Hi there,

If the drive is new, it may not be formatted yet. It will install okay, but when you go to locate the drive in "My Computer", it will not show up because there is no partition on it to store anything. To do this, just run any partition program, such as Partition Magic, or you can use the "Disk Management" tool in the "Computer Management" window of Windows. (Right-click My Computer > Manage)

Hope this helps.

 

[Nidge]

Is your laptop rated at 2.0 at the usb ports or is it 1.0? I ran into the same problem. You may have to go to best buy or Wal-mart or someplace like that and purchase a high speed hub. Even then, it takes a few seconds for your external hard drive to show up in Computer.

 

[Specsnow]

Whether or not the USB is 2.0 or 1.1 will not matter because all USB hard drives and enclosures are backwards compatible. All that will affect is the speed at which data is transferred. Also, a hub won't help either if it is 1.1. A hub can make one 2.0 port into 4 (or more) and a 1.1 port into 4 (or more) but it cannot turn a 1.1 into a 2.0. That's not possible. You'd have to replace the USB board in the laptop with a new 2.0 one to do that, which is somewhat hard, and very costly (unless you do it yourself, which then will only cost about 50-80 dollars).

Regardless, the USB class isn't a factor here.

 

[fbird62004]

thank you Specsnow...your advice helped me get my drive up and running...