External USB Drive Problem

[miclinux]

Thank you in anticipation for your help.

I have a Maxtor external USB Hard Drive. Its about a year old but virtually unused. When I bought it it worked fine until I tried to install Norton Ghost, and Ghost my C: drive onto the External Drive.

This didn't work at the time and as I was busy I left the thing sit on the shelf.

Just recently I tried again to use connect it to my PC. When I plug it in Windows XP recognises it. I get the warning sound that I have plugged in a new device. The USB port shows that the device is connected. The "safely remove hardware" button in the tray shows that a mass storage device is connected.

However when I go to Windows Explorer I can't see this drive to copy data over to it.

I have rebooted etc but to no avail.


Any ideas??

Mike

[Thebranded]

check your disk management settings, has the drive been formatted? if not you can do it from there.

i'd also open it up and see if any connections were lose, or a build up of dust and the like.

i assume power is goinf to the drive? fan spins lights come on?

[glc]

It will not show up in Explorer unless it has an active partition and is assigned a drive letter. This must be done in Disk Management. The failed Ghost job probably corrupted the partition. In Disk Management, remove any partitions on the drive, create a new partition and format it, make sure a drive letter is assigned.

[sgtspector]

If ur hdd was ntfs and you attempted to ghost it onto a maxtor external it most likley would not work. The maxtor is fat32 and dont believe it can be converted to ntfs I tried mine using windows disk management and partition magic 8.0. The incompatible file systems probably corrupted the file system on the maxtor.

[glc]

All external drives can be converted to NTFS.

[sgtspector]

I have to try again then my maxtor 80 gb would not convert with either program. Thanx i thought it was limitation of the drive because it was external.

[glc]

To convert a drive to NTFS, you can do this from a Windows command prompt.

convert x: /fs:ntfs

Where x: is the drive letter.

[sgtspector]

Do you know if it will work from safe mode command prompt? I tried to do it from a Windows command prompt but no luck. Didn't work in disk manager either.

[glc]

What error did you get when you tried it? This only works with NT-based OS's (2K, XP).

[sgtspector]

Dont know what message was cuz i walked away and when i came back i thought it was done, when i chekced it, it was still fat32. I guess om gonna have to sit and watch the paint dry next time.