Vista wont detect external HD

LittleHoov

New Member
I have an ATA drive in a USB enclosure, when I kick the power on, Vista detects and installs drivers for everything, including the hard drive inside the enclosure, but the drive does not show up under My Computer, and I cant write to it or read from it.

Some things Ive tried/noticed:

The instructions with the enclosure say to set the drive to master, tried that, it wouldnt detect the drive, it only detects it when set to CSEL or Slave, it might also detect it on single, but I cant remember that one.


Its a USB 2.0 drive, I thought all my slots were as I just purchased this laptop in February, but I tried ports on both sides and same story all around.


The one thing Im leaning too, I bought the drive off Ebay, I do not know if it was properly formatted or not, I just put it in my enclosure and off I went, should I pull it back out and hook it up to an ATA based machine?


Its supposed to be a "driver less" design, says right on the box, so I dont think theres much I can do in that area.

Thanks in advance.
 
You need to go into disk management and partition and format the drive before it will show up in My Computer
 
I will try to hook it up to another computer and format it, right now I cant even see it under disk management on my laptop. I have an XP based desktop that I can hook it up too and see what happens. But for now I must go to work, stupid jobs!
 
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