I have a 60Gig external drive for my laptop which has a USB interface that has worked well. But it has no protecing enclosure, so I bought one at Fortune Town (850THB) and am switching to it's USB interface. But when I went to install it, the file system will not recognize it under My Computer. However, Device Manager sees it fine. In "safely remove hardware" it shows up with the correct name and will disappear when turning off power or unplugging AND it will appear again with power on or plug in.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the device, always rebooting but to no avail.

Any ideas ?

Thanks for any help.

You need to format the drive.

Go to Control Panel/ Admin tools/Computer Mangement/Storage/Disk management.

Right click on the new drive and format it.

Astral

Can't do that. Formatting causes all files to be lost and it has some 45 Gig of files on it that I do not want to lose.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

Astral

Can't do that. Formatting causes all files to be lost and it has some 45 Gig of files on it that I do not want to lose.

Thanks for the suggestion though.

Might make sure the jumper on your drive is set for master and not cable select (assuming IDE drive). Some controllers may have problems otherwise.

Have you enabled it? Device manager/hard drive (right click)/properties/general/enable? Not sure but believe I had to do that when I first installed mine.

I find that external drives sometimes do not appear automatically under My Computer when first plugged in. Clicking on My Computer again or starting a new instance of Windows Explorer generally causes the drive to appear.

I have also seen this happen because of lack of power to the drive . if the usb cable has 2 plugs for the computer , plug them into 2 different usb sockets.

Better still an external supply.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

I have not confirmed this yet (bought a 300G SATA and installed it OK)

but it looks for sure that I needed the master setting jumper.

The present USB interface I have seems to have this in the cable

as I dropped back to it and it works fine with no jumper.

Another funny thing was that I could not format a new 300G SATA

thru a hub to the USB port on my laptop. Took it back to

FortuneTown and the tech just hooked it up directly to a desktop

and Disk management saw the drive and formatted it easily.

So I think that going thru the hub may have somehow not

allowed my laptop to format it.

On the other hand my Windows system is 2.5 yrs old with

all sorts of little annoying problems that have accumulated (even tho I

have Sp2 installed) so this could be an extension of that condition.

I will reinstall Windows from scrach once I get all my data backed up.

Cheers

Final Update ......

The master switch setting was NOT the problem.

It was the external enclosure I bought at some shop in Fortune Town.

Confirmed this with a tech on the 4th floor.

So the enclosure (not the drive or a cable) was bad, but the shop would not take it back as it had been more than 7 days. So I got stiffed for 850THB.

Moral; Always make them install and demonstrate whenever possible before paying and leaving.