Computer won't recognize external HD

Status
Not open for further replies.

mom26gr8kids

Posts: 574   +0
Back in May we purchased a new hard drive for our computer, but then in August the motherboard went out. Since I am not "techie" enough to mess around with motherboards we bought another computer. We recently purchased an external enclosure to turn the IDE drive we bought into an external hard drive. We have an IDE/ATA drive. We got it into the enclosure, hooked it up to the power source and then the computer, but the computer is not recognizing it. When we turned it on it said that it was installing driver software, and that the software had been successfully installed. The problem is I cannot find the device to access the files that are on it, shouldn't it appear under the devices with removable storage? If anyone can help me figure out how to find the device on my computer I would appreciate that.

The previous hard drive has Windows XP on it for it's OS and our new computer has Windows Vista. I don't think that would keep the drive from showing up though since we have it on slave settings and have not attempted to access any of the OS files on the old hard drive. If the hard drive is set to slave and we are using it externally then it shouldn't matter if there are other OS files on there should it?


Someone suggested to me that I try using TWEAK UI, but when I looked into downloading that it sounded like it was only for XP, and I certainly don't want to download something that might create havoc with my computer.

Thanks
Kendra
 
For the external enclosure try setting the jumper to master. Master/Slave is for when you have two devices on the same IDE cable. That is no longer the case with this hard drive.
 
Also...cheap cases (not cost) can drive you nuts with not being recognized by a computer. Sometimes it is a driver, sometimes it is the format differences, and sometimes it is a quirk in the new computer. I had one that I tried on three different computers before it was recognized. They were all the same brand and model computers with the only difference being upgraded accessories. The driver used on the working computer was the same used on the other two. Once configured and data was copied to it from the new computer it seemed to settle down. Then I made the mistake of taking it to a desktop running XP SP2 and the whole problem of recognition started again until I returned it to the one that worked.

I'm still scratching my head over that one. It was a converted 2.5" laptop drive.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back