My hard drive won't work!!!1

Factual Questions
1

Ok, so I’m all excited! My hard drive got here today. I’ve got a Maxtor 200GB hard drive and a Kingwin enclosure for it.

Put the hard drive in the enclosure fine, plugged it in, the little lights came on, and windows xp let me know that I just put a mass storage device in my usb port. Then nothing. So I restart.

Restart finished, it gives me some BS about how my new hardware is installed and ready to use… except it’s not. It won’t show up in My Computer. It shows up in device manager, though, so I know that something’s right.

What can I do from here?

2

You’ll also need Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or Windows 2000 with SP3 to access more than 137GB on a single drive, since the original releases of XP (both Home and Professional editions) and 2000 won’t support big drives. You can download Windows XP Service Pack 1a or Windows 2000 Service Pack 3.

http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article/0,aid,115629,00.asp

3

Does it show up in Disk Manager? Perhaps it just needs to be partitioned and formatted.

4

I’ve got SP1 for XP.

Where’s Disk Manager? It doesn’t show up at all on “My Computer”.

5

Forgot some information. It’s hooked up with USB 2.0, if it helps. It’ll be Firewire at some point, but I don’t have a 6-pin to 4-pin adapter. Getting one in the next couple of days.

6

You’ll have to either right click on My Computer and select Management or go to Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management.

More or less

7

I didn’t even know that that existed. Really cool, guys.

Looks like it’s working now (I’m transferring a bunch of files there now), and I have one more question:

My drive that’s inside my computer is really weird. When I partitioned it, it made sense to me. I have a 5 gig partition C: with windows and all of my program stuff, a 5 gig partition E: that I was going to put linux on, but then decided it was going to be pointless, and a 20 gig partition F:, where I have a bunch of movies and stuff.

I’m moving E: and F: to my new big hard drive. Is there any way to combine those three on my computer into one big 30 gig partition? Can I do it with the cool manager thing?

8

Well, you could, if you used Partition Magic… otherwise, it’s likely that your data will be fuxxored. Even if you do use PM, there’s no guarantee that your partion won’t be fuxxored. The safest way is to backup all your neato stuff into your neato 200 HDD, and do a full format/repartioning/reinstall.

9

Alright, I’m posting this here instead of starting a new thread, since it’s a similar problem. I have a new HD and I also cannot get it to work.

It’s a 250 GB SATA drive. I have XP w/ SP2, and I installed the SATA drivers from my motherboard’s driver CD, and rebooted. Well, I know this drive has problems. I have never… NEVER been able to boot up with it plugged in. Even though nowhere in the boot list in the BIOS is it listed, if it’s plugged in during boot up, the system freezes ater the mobo post screen before XP starts. I tried to actually install XP to this drive but had the same problem. I had it, the floppy, and CD drive plugged in, boot order was floppy, then CD, then nothing, it would say loading from CD, but nothing would happen. Unplugged it, Windows installer loaded fine, but since the HD wasn’t there when it loaded, I couldn’t install to it (and yes, I had the SATA drivers on a floppy. It wouldn’t load them from the floppy because it didn’t see any SATA drive to get drivers for.)

Well, I just did a repair install on the old HD (I got a new mobo) and am right now just trying to install this drive so it’s not completly useless. So, seeing as SATA is hot-swappable, I started with it unplugged, installed drivers, restarted, ten plugged it in, and XP detected it. It shows up in device manager, but not in Disk Management.

Usually, when I select that option under Computer Management, I get nothing. It says ‘Connecting to Logical Disk Management Service’ and does nothing. Sometimes it locks up the program. A couple of times, it actually loaded up, but only shows my CD-RW and C:\ drive.

Anyone have any ideas what might be going on here?

10

That’s what I was afraid you’d say. I may tackle it tomorrow, but I hate reformats.