Messed up installing external HD drive

[Lee Antony]

I took a Seagate 350 GB drive out of my old pc and stuck it in an Akasa
external enclosure. When I plug this into my new desktop I hear ding-dong
and an icon appears in the systray saying it can safely remove hardware.
Device Manager shows a USB Device under Disk drives.

That seemed good so I was expecting that this drive would show up somewhere
in Windows Explorer so I could use it for backups but the pesky thing seems
to be invisible.

I know I must have made some silly blunder but I would appreciate it if
anyone could stop from laughing long enough to tell me where I went wrong.

 

[Jon Wallace]

Hi,

Have you tried looking in disk manager to see if you need to give it a drive
letter? I've seen on occasion an external drive not show up because of a
driver letter conflict.

Right click on the My Computer and choose Manage. Go to disk management and
see if you see your partition on the drive. If you do, right click and
select to change the drive letter, add one and you should be good to go.

Come back if you're still having problems...

Good Luck!
Jon

 

[Pedro]

I took a Seagate 350 GB drive out of my old pc and stuck it in an Akasa
external enclosure. When I plug this into my new desktop I hear ding-dong
and an icon appears in the systray saying it can safely remove hardware.
Device Manager shows a USB Device under Disk drives.

That seemed good so I was expecting that this drive would show up
somewhere in Windows Explorer so I could use it for backups but the pesky
thing seems to be invisible.

I know I must have made some silly blunder but I would appreciate it if
anyone could stop from laughing long enough to tell me where I went wrong.

Try Control Panel; Computer Management; Storage; Disk Management (Local);
wait a few seconds for it to check the connected drives.

See if there is a drive unpartitioned. It may show as Disk 1 or Disk 2
(depending on how many HDDs you have) but with no drive letter but marked
"Unallocated". If so, that would be the "lost" drive - Explorer would not
see it.

You just need to partition and format it.

If that is not the problem, perhaps check the jumper settings
(Master/Slave/Cable Select), although I confess offhand I don't recall what
it should be - I'd have to open a HDD external enclosure and look at it
and/or play with it. But I'll leave that for you to do

Pedro

Pedro

 

[Lee Antony]

Thanks Jon and Pedro.

Nothing was showing up under Disk Management but you reminded me that I had
not changed the jumper since pulling the drive from a desktop. As I don't
know what the setting should be I just tried with no jumpering and lo,
everything works.

Thank you for taking the time to reply.