Winxp won't recognize USB HDD

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I just built a new system and I took my old HDD out. It is a 90 GB Hitachi, and I put it in a Venus DS3 enclosure. Here is the story:

1) The drive had 3 partitions, I wanted to make it 1.
2) I formatted all 3 existing partitions.
3) I used Disk Management to delete the existing partitions.
4) I rebooted, Windows recognizes that a USB device is connected, but it is "unknown". The drive no longer appears in Disk Management.
5) I've connected it both with firewire and USB 2.0, doesn't work either way.
6) I tried to reboot with the device still on but Windows won't get to the log in screen until I turn it off.

So, any ideas on how to get Windows Disk Management to see the device?
 
for now just plug it in directly into your pc(no usb) and run disk management again to format to fat32 or ntfs etc... see if that works
 
thanks, I will connect it internally and give it a try.

Another weird thing is I noticed that now my C: drive shows up in the status bar near the clock with the "safely remove" icon (arrow on PCMCIA card). Has anyone seen this before?
 
I still have nothing, here is what I tried:

1) connect the hdd up internally as a slave. BIOS recognizes drive but not Windows (or Disk Management).

2) disconnect primary hdd, change the problem hdd from slave to master and boot with winxp CD. Recreate partitions - it wouldn't let me create 1 90 GB partition, I had to segment it into 75 and 13 GB which is what I orginally had ???

Change back to slave and reconnect original primary drive. BIOS recognizes the drive but Windows does not (or Disk Management).

4) Take the drive out and put it back into the external HDD enclosure. Connected via USB or Firewire Disk Management still doesn't see the drive.

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My next idea is to hook it back up as the only internal hdd and go through the process of formatting the drive with WinXP setup, then pulling it out and sticking it in the enclosure. It should have the winxp setup files on it but I can wipe that later.

Anyone have any other ideas? I don't know of any other way to format the drive if Windows won't recognize it.
 
I realize I figured this out myself, but thought I'd post that formatting in WinXP setup did the trick in case anyone searches for a similar program. Make sure you create all the partitions in WinXP setup if you are having the same issues I am.

I just formatted them and I'm good to go.

Oh, and I think the reason that Windows wouldn't see the drive when I had it installed internally was that it caused me to mix a SATA and IDE drive.

And the sticky on partitioning just made me me want to restart from scratch, very helpful.
 
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