USB 2.0 External Hard Disk - wont work

nadir

I just bought a 160 Gig external maxtor drive from komplett with a Zynet Case 3.5" and I cant get it to work in windows. It seems to detect it ok, cause it shows an icon in the systray asking if I want to remove it, when I go to control panel and trouble shoot or add/remove hardware it says the device is working properly.
But it still wont show up in my computer or in Explorer or as any drive in DOS if i try to f: e: etc. There are also no bad irq settings and ive tried several different usb ports including a usb 1.0 hub and a usb 2.0 pci card. My computer is running win2k SP2 , and I tried it in Karl Hungus's machine which runs win XP. Same problem.
Some drivers came with it on a cd but they are only for win98; and win2k seems to have its own built in one.

c:\\Winnt\System32\drivers\USBSTOR.SYS

I tried the win98 one for the heck of it anyway but nothing exciting happened.
Im also sure that the device is fine because it works in linux perfectly. when I got it, I added a primary partition with fdisk and made a vfat (32) 153 G partition with

mkfs.vfat -F 32 -m note -n external /dev/sda1

I did this before on a mates External disk, and it worked fine in windows.
But just incase this was causing windows problems, I completely wiped it all and removed the partition to see if I could format it in windows, but no, same thing again. Ive even tried to make a superfloppy vfat disk (i.e no partitions) but as usual no joy!
so what gives?

jessy

Do you have or can you get you get access to partion magic 8. i had a similar problem and it sorted it out.

Random

You'll need to enable large disk support in Windows XP.

Random

Have a look here: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;303013 for information on doing that.

Hope that helps.

nadir

yea, goku at galway lan fixed it, partitionmagic seemed to do the trick, thks for teh help!

Random

ok, no worries

elvis2002

Sounds like the drive wasnt given a drive letter by windows when plugged in. Partition magic may have given it one automatically. You can do this in administrative settings - computermanagment - storage in control panel if anybody else has any problems.