External USB HD Kit shows wrong disk size.

[!TG]

I just purchase an External USB hard drive enclosure and two 250GB drives.
I tried both drives in the enclosure (one at a time obviously) but both show
the size as 2048GB under diskmanagement.
When I format it says the task did not complete successfully. Either quick
or long format.

 

[Factor 13]

I just purchase an External USB hard drive enclosure and two 250GB drives.
I tried both drives in the enclosure (one at a time obviously) but both
show the size as 2048GB under diskmanagement.
When I format it says the task did not complete successfully. Either quick
or long format.

Are you trying to format these drives while in Windows? Hard drives in USB
enclosures can be tricky to format in Windows XP. I had to use a bootable
rescue CD and was able to format a drive that way. Another possibility is to
install a new a hard drive in your PC as a second drive, and format it from
there.

 

[!TG]

I was trying from Windows. I will try your other suggested methods and
report back.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I just purchase an External USB hard drive enclosure and two 250GB
drives. I tried both drives in the enclosure (one at a time obviously) but
both show the size as 2048GB under diskmanagement.
When I format it says the task did not complete successfully. Either
quick or long format.

You need two things to support a drive over 137GB:

1. A motherboard with a BIOS and controller that supports 48-bit LBA (or
alternatively, an add-in controller card that does).

2. At least SP1 of Windows XP.

Do you have both of these?

 

[Dave B.]

Ken, it's USB, the motherboard controller is irrelevant.