Problem accessing external USB Harddisk

[egrath]

Hi,

i have a little problem accessing a new bought external USB Harddisk on my Win2k Box. When i connect the Drive, it shows up in the Device Manager, but i am unable to assign a Drive letter to it using the Disk Manager (not shows up at all there). The Harddisk itself is formatted with FAT32 and works when booting to my WinXP Installation on the same machine.

Any suggestions?

Thanks, Egon

/edit:

The external Disk has 60 GB size and is a USB 2.0 Device

Edited December 21, 2005 by egrath

[kimokid]

Hi, take the Hard Disk out of the usb enclosure, and check the jumper pins on the back of the HDD, on top is usually a diagram showing this you need the jumper to be in Master, not slave or C/S (cable select) put it all back together and it should then appear in my computer.

All encosures i have used need the HDD to be set to master in order for it to actually apear as it should, otherwise windows will detect it, though you carn't do nothing with it

[Aegis]

Are you sure you don't need to install an additional driver? I know that some of my hardware has more than two components in Device Manager.

[pmshah]

Hi, take the Hard Disk out of the usb enclosure, and check the jumper pins on the back of the HDD, on top is usually a diagram showing this you need the jumper to be in Master, not slave or C/S (cable select) put it all back together and it should then appear in my computer.

All encosures i have used need the HDD to be set to master in order for it to actually apear as it should, otherwise windows will detect it, though you carn't do nothing with it

If that is the case how come it works under XP & not under W2K? To start with the USB HDD system s**cks. There is insufficient bandwidth and resources (under windows) available to do anything useful. Whatever is available is once again shared amongs all the peripherals. All processing is done by the CPU. My experience with a whole variety of USB enclosures has been extremely unsatisfactory. The partitions on the external drive appear & disappear with different drive letters without any input on my part. To top it all these require external power supply ( 5V & 12V).

I would not even call it a "poorman's firewire" but a "beggarman's firewire".

[Guest Fuj!n]

I have the same problem as egrath as well. I just don't understand why all my extern hard-disks (USB 2.0) don't work on Windows server 2003 R2 ?? while it was working just fine with Windows XP)

Does anyone know how we can fix this problem?

[tguy]

Not sure if this will help but did you remove the USB drive from device manager on your Windows XP installation using 'Safely Remove Hardware' before you switched to Server 2003? There may be something still registered in the hardware configuration that is preventing it from working correctly with disk manager.

I use a WD USB/Firewire drive with FAT32 partitions quite successfully between my XP and 2003 machines but I always do a safe remove before disconnecting the drive.

Try it out, can't hurt.