I have an old toshiba portege 7020ct, 40gb hdd, running xp home. My hdd is going up the spout so I bought a new 2.5" 40gb hdd and a usb2 hdd enclosure. All I want to do is use xxclone to clone the new hdd so I can then install it in the laptop, because I haven't got a windows disk it just came pre-installed on the laptop. The trouble is that the laptop doesn't detect the new hdd. I have a usb2 pcmcia card plugged in as the laptop only has usb1. The card is working as I plugged a 250gb external hdd in and transferred all the stuff I want to keep. When I plug it into usb1 port it just comes up power surge in port, so it's detecting something. Hubby plugged the new hdd in the usb enclosure into our desktop pc and it detected it straight away and he formatted the new drive to ntfs. I then tried plugging into laptop and it still isn't detecting it. Any help greatly appreciated as my laptop keeps getting blue screen of death as my hdd is dying a slow death and it takes ages to get it running again.

sue

Take the hard drive out of the laptop and place it in the USB enclosure. Connect the enclosure to the desktop system and save the files from the laptop hard drive to the desktop

make sure you use external power on the USB hd.

see this note

I have a USB power adapter that piggybacks off the keyboard connector. I also use a powered USB add-on device

I can't save the files to the desktop as I need to clone the whole hard drive as I need the operating system, when cloning it deletes everything off the drive you are cloning to, that's why I need to clone to the new empty hard drive. The usb hdd doesn't have a separate power supply, there's nowhere on the unit to plug one in, just a usb port, that's how we connected it to the desktop pc and it worked fine on that just not on the laptop.

Yea, you're stuck with USB supplied power if there's no place for the power connection.

I saw one device that used (2) usb connections from the system to the device
so as to allow more than 500ma, but yours will not take ANY form of external power,
so you have to assume the vendor did it right (hum????).

Yeah mine has got 1 usb that goes to the hdd and 2 on the other end. I've tried connecting it by both ends to the usb2 hub but still nothing. hubby connected it to desktop with just 1 end. I,ve been scouring the internet and some people say you only need to use 1 while others have had to use both. I've tried adding new hardware but that doesn't work and neither the laptop or the desktop will read the driver disk that came with the hdd case, but from what i've been reading it doesn't need drivers and there's no make or model number on it so I can't search for drivers on the net.

This is the one I have.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI....m=200204514648&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT&ih=010

the link doesn't report the device specs

cAN'T get anything useful from that link, they all take you to microsoft update site which shows my laptop as needing no critical update, I already ran automatic updates after I plugged in the hdd this afternoon. What I meant about the usb is that my laptop has only usb1,(it's old, practically just an electric typwriter, lol) so I've had to use a usb2 pcmcia card to update it as the hdd storage case is usb2.It took me ages to install that yesterday as it kept coming up as installed but not working, finally found out I had to enable usb in the bios to get it working, which meant shutting down the laptop, which resulted in blue death screen again, and running chkdsk again to boot it, but after it restarted hours later the usb automatically installed straight away. This laptop is making me wanna scream but can't afford a more up to date one for quite a while, and I want to make this one workable anyway so my kids can use it when i've finished with it.

humbug; the first link looked like a non-ms link, sorry.

have you considered a REPAIR install ?

already done a repair install using chkdsk but the hard drive has got so many bad sectors that are unrepairable and the boot sector keeps getting damaged, so keep having to repair install everytime it crashes to make another boot sector. It's really only any use as an external drive now just to back up files. If I can't get the laptop to detect the new hdd my only option is to try and find an xp installation disk. Using xxclone to clone my drive and make it bootable is soo easy and installing it in the laptop only takes a minute also, but I need to be able to access both drives simultaneously and the only way to do this on the laptop is by an external drive caddy, arggghhhhhh, lol.

Ah another solution is just to buy another usb caddy, put my damaged drive in it and connect them both to the desktop and use xxclone on there to do it seen as though that has no problem detecting the drives. So another long wait from ebay for another caddy before I can fix this stupid pc, I'm starting to lose the will to live now, lol. On the up side, before it crashed I knew nothing about computers, but since it crashed i've spent 2 weeks continuously googling stuff and know the inside of my laptop like the back of my hand plus loads of other stuff, lol.