Hi,

I picked up an 160 GB external USB HD this past weekend that was on sale. It came preformatted as FAT32. While my Dell C600 notebook system (Windows XP) sees, mounts and uses the drive without any problems, my older desktop system (also Windows XP) does not. The system knows I have plugged something in, but never properly initializes it for use. The device manager shows a ping (!) beside the "USB Mass Storage Device" entry that pops up when the drive is plugged in.

I am suspecting there is a BIOS problem (although it is the latest available version for my 5 year old MB) because this older system also will not recognize several other large capacity (60 GB to 80 GB) HDs that I have tried to use on it (system won't even boot when they are attached). On the other hand, I have successfully used an 80 GB external USB HD on the desktop that was formatted as NTFS (go figure). The only suggestion that the external HD manufacturer recommended was reformat the 160 HD as NTFS.

Has anyone else run into this problem before, and how did you solve it (short of buying a new computer)?

Thanks,
Tomboy

i would split the harddisk in 2 or more partitions ...

just my 5c

have a nice day
kernel

Hi,

Well, reformatting the drive to NTFS did not help. Although my desktop system makes the normal "the-thunk" sound when the external HD is connected to the USB cable, it never initializes correctly. I am planning to assemble a new system, so perhaps I can just wait until it is finished.

Tomboy

I assume you "uninstalled" the device from the Control Panel Device Manager, then unplugged and repluged.

@rikytik,

Yes, I did remove the device using the Device Manager and let the system redetect and mount the drive. Still no joy.

Tomboy

Have you enabled 48 bit LBA on your desktop ?

Yeap as BearCat stated you must enable 48 bit LBA.

Why you ask? ;)

A computer with a hard disk that has a capacity of greater than 137 gigabytes (GB).

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;EN-US;305098

As BC and War said......
I see you have XP on both your systems,but does your older computer has SP1 installed? :)

September 06, 2004 Update:

Adding the EnableBigLba key did not help (or hurt) my problem. I am not going the worry about it anymore. I'll just wait for the new P4 system I'm building to be finished.

Tomboy

@roadworker,

Yes, in fact, both systems have Windows XP SP1 installed.

@BearCat,

No, until your message I had never heard of 48 bit LBA. I have gone into the registry and created the EnableBigLba = x01 DWORD key. I will let you know if this helped. However, I strongly suspect that my BIOS does not support 48 bit LBA.

Thanks for the ideas guys.

Tomboy