Failure to recognize external hard drive

[Guest]

I have a Western Digital Passport external hard drive attached thru a USB2
port to a Dell Inspiron 3800 running XP Pro. The device manager says the
drive is working, but it says the drive is not formatted, when I know it is.
It used to work fine on this computer. I hooked it up to another computer
running Windows 98 and it works fine, formatting and all. Western Digital
says the driver is in XP so it doesn't need a new driver. Any idea why it
won't read the drive?

 

[Guest]

Is the drive formated in fat 16 or fat 32 ??

 

[Fred S]

If you are sure the external works fine on other PC's then the external
is fine and it must be that the USB port/driver on the Inspiron may have
gotten corrupted somehow.

It's not a big deal but go into Device Manager and remove ALL the USB
entries there for controllers, ports. hubs etc.

Reboot windows (without the external connected) and let windows "find
new hardware" - it will then re-install all of the USB drivers.

Lastly plug in your external to be sure it is working.

One more thing, go back into Device Manager and check to see that there
are NO power management settings on to allow windows to shut down the
port to save power. You might want to even do that first.

Let us know how it goes.

Fred

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Is the drive formated in fat 16 or fat 32 ??

It doesn't matter. I don't know what his problem is, but Windows XP can read
FAT16 and FAT32 (also FAT12 and NTFS) with equal facility, in any and all
combinations.