Having trouble with a 2.5" usb hard drive in windows xp? read on

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is your 2.5" usb hard drive showing up in device manager, but not in disk management or my computer? have you made sure you're running the latest windows service pack and drivers for your usb controller? are you certain that the drive is physically OK? have you gone to ridiculous lengths just to make sure you're not overlooking something? feeling like throwing it out the window?

right, well if you answered yes to all of those, read on. i spent the entire afternoon yesterday trying to fix the above problem, and it turned out to be extremely simple - check to see if your drive has a "drive lock password" set. if so, remove it from the enclosure, and plug it into a laptop that supports the feature (using the IDE interface). go into the BIOS, clear the password, then plug the disk back into your enclosure, and try again. of course, you will need to know the password in order to clear it. this fixed the problem for me.

i do this stuff for a living, so i'm feeling quite red-faced, but we live and learn... hopefully someone benefits from this and saves themself half a day.

(for information's sake, another symptom of this problem was that windows would generate application event log error #30 whenever the disk was plugged in, claiming that it couldnt write to harddisk0. the source of the error was "dmio". note: these errors were marked as informational events, rather than warnings or errors, so don't simply filter the results by type or you'll miss them.)

cheers,
ds
 
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