Ext. HardDrive Recognized, but not accessible

[Guest]

I bought an external hard drive enclosure and a 200GB Hitachi Deskstar 7k250 Ultra ATA/100 Hard drive. Windows recognizes the drive as a USB mass storage unit in the device manager but it does not give an icon or assign a letter for it in "my computer." HOW DO I ACCESS MY DRIVE?

 

[Daniel Roth]

You have to create a partition on the drive, and format it.

You can do this in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer
Maintenance -> Diskmanager

I bought an external hard drive enclosure and a 200GB Hitachi Deskstar

7k250 Ultra ATA/100 Hard drive. Windows recognizes the drive as a USB mass
storage unit in the device manager but it does not give an icon or assign a
letter for it in "my computer." HOW DO I ACCESS MY DRIVE?

 

[Alex Nichol]

I bought an external hard drive enclosure and a 200GB Hitachi Deskstar 7k250 Ultra ATA/100 Hard drive. Windows recognizes the drive as a USB mass storage unit in the device manager but it does not give an icon or assign a letter for it in "my computer."

A hard drive before it can be used has to be partitioned and formatted.
have you done that? Control Panel - Admin Tools - Computer Management,
select Disk Management and look lower right for the graphic of the
drive. R-click in Unallocated space and Create Partition.

BTW with a drive of that size you will need the associated hardware and
BIOS to handle '48 bit LBA' and for XP to have SP1, or you will not be
able to use more than 128GB (binary notation - 137 decimal billion to
compare with the 200)