Not Reading Hard Drive

[Southy]

Hey guys,

I have this internal hard drive which I am trying to hook up to my laptop via an USB - IDE cable, that works fine and windows says it detects new hardware and installs and says device ready for use, but the device doesnt create a new drive letter or show up in My Computer. Its like Windows detects that its there but doesnt want to use it.

I have heard of hard drives being locked and/or having to be unlocked before they can be used, do you think that, that might be the case here? I'm not really sure but certainly open to any ideas so I can get this drive working for extra storage space. So any ideas?

 

[mgoldb2]

IF it a brand new harddrive then you need to partition it before is will show up. If you using windows xp I gave directions on how to do this in a previous thread.

Go to Control Panel / Administrative Tools / Computer Management / Disk Management

hopfully it will see the new harddrive here and then

Click on the small section that says "Unknown" or "Not Initialized".
Right click and select "Initialize Disk" then right click on the right
portion of the next window and select "New Partition" to start the New
Partition Wizard.

you'll find instructions with graphics which will walk you through

after it been partition it should show up so you can format it.

 

[Southy]

This hard drive actually is not brand new, it is a hard drive I picked up from someone and they never used it, so I suppose I could try partitioning it. I also have this other hard drive which was pulled straight from an XBOX and does the exact same thing.

 

[mgoldb2]

This hard drive actually is not brand new, it is a hard drive I picked up from someone and they never used it, so I suppose I could try partitioning it. I also have this other hard drive which was pulled straight from an XBOX and does the exact same thing.

I would try partitioning it. one never been use and the other am not a expert on xbox but it possiable that they use something other then ntfs and fat32 which would cause it not to show up.