Built USB HDD

I just got a 200GB Western Digital Hard Drive and an external enclosure to add on to my laptop as a back-up drive.

Once I plugged it in and Windows XP did its install, I could not see the drive in MY Computer. I checked the Device Manager, it sees it and is working properly. I have the HDD setup as Master. Is there something I missed?
I have rebooted to see if that would corect it, but it did not see it still. Any suggestions would greatly be appreciated.

Thanks,

Powerman

 

Well, I did more searching and finally got it figured out. I assumed that the WD HDD was pre-formatted. Well, after reading a thread at another forum, I found out that it wasn't. I am posting the info here so that it may help others.

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How to troubleshoot a USB hard drive

We must be clear here that we are not talking about flash or “finger” USB drives here. We are discussing the good, old-fashioned spinning hard disk drives. These would include some MP3 players like the iPod and other “full-sized” players.

The first thing to note when trying to fix a USB hard drive is whether it was pre-assembled or if you/a friend assembled it. Pre-assembled drives are generally less troublesome. If they do not work, these are the reasons, generally:

· A defective or damaged drive/cable.
· A problematic PC or Windows installation.
· A PC that doesn’t meet the minimum system requirements of the drive – check BIOS support and update, check Windows version.
· Windows hasn’t assigned a letter to the drive.
· The drive doesn’t get sufficient power – all drives should have an AC power supply. Power supplements from the PC or laptop are rarely sufficient.

When discussing home-built drives, we must add a problem or two to the above list:

· The drive used was not jumpered properly.
· Pins were bent during the assembly the drive.
· The drive was not formatted from the factory and requires partitioning and formatting.


Details

- The most common problem is the lack of proper formatting. In Windows 2000 and XP, there is a utility called Disk Management (DISKMGMT.MSC). It’s in Administrative Tools > Computer Management. The drive should appear there. If it does, right-click the drive and select New Partition. The rest comes easily. When done, the drive should be formatted and assigned a letter. If a letter is not assigned, right-click and assign a letter. If the drive doesn’t appear in Disk Management, there is another problem somewhere.

We should note here that, many times, the drive only needs a letter assigned. Do so with Disk Management.

In Windows 98/ME, the user can click Start > Run > Command > OK and then type FDISK in the DOS Window to partition and format the drive. Most times, the manufacturer includes a utility and instructions for formatting the drive.

- The third most common issue is mis-jumpering the assembled drive. Western Digital and IBM/Hitachi have specific jumper settings for situations where the drive is not paired with a slave drive. This is such a case. Refer to this link.

The best practice is to just use Cable Select on all USB drives.

- Next is insufficient power. Most 3.5” drives come with AC adapters and these are rarely a problem. Unfortunately, 2.5” notebook-sized USB drives usually lack an AC adapter and are a huge problem. We have yet to see a USB disk drive that gets it’s power from PC or laptop and works with any consistency. Always seek a product which has it’s own power source.