External Hard Drive not found

[bernieuk1]

Hi
I have just purchased a Western Digital Passport external hard drive when I plug it into my laptop running vista it finds it stright away but when I plug it into my desktop running XP nothing happens it does not find it and when i go into my computer there is nothing there. Can anybody pleses help.

 

[Tmagic650]

So have you formatted it properly using the NTFS type format?

 

[Cybelex]

Look in Disk Management in XP to see if it is there:

Right-click Computer > Manage > Disk Management.

Does anything new show up in Device Manager? Do other USB devices work on that same port?

If the drive is new, you should remove the partitions and create new ones before use. Some people have lost access to their drives later when they have relied on the manufacturer's process.

 

[bernieuk1]

I have formatted the hard drive as NTFS I go into disk management but it does not find the hard drive if i plug something else into the same usb port for example my camera or a memory card reader windows finds it stright away.

 

[Tmagic650]

So what system did you format the external drive on?

 

[bernieuk1]

I formated the hard drive on my laptop. Thanks for trying to help I have now found out what the problem is, I have been useing a USB extension cable on my PC as the USB ports are all on the back and not very accessable I don't think it gets enough power to spin the disks through the extension cable as soon as i plugged it into the port with the supplied cable windows found it, the only problem is the supplied cable is only short I guess other people must have come across this problem. Of course this was not a problem on my laptop as the ports are accessable I had not used an extension.

Thanks Again

Bernie.