Unable to locate external hard drives.

[chonasdad]

Hi there. I have a Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop, running XP Pro, 1.2 Gig RAM and the Centrino 1500Mhz CPU. My problem is that I cannot locate my external hard drives even though when I plug them in to either USB socket I get a message that states my hardware is loaded and ready to use.
I must point out that these hard drives were internal spares and I decided to use them by buying two external housings which connect via the USB sockets. One housing is for laptop hard drives, the other is for the IDE hard drives, and the latter also plugs into the mains for power.
Prior to disconnecting these drives I have checked their properties and they seem to be located at "Location 0". Ordinary usb flash drives are easily located as drives E or F but the external drives don´t appear in the drive listings so I can´t click to open them or send data to them. Your help would be appreciated. I´m not permanently online here in Spain so please be patient when expecting replies from me. Ta very much.

[arraknid]

You may just need to check any jumper settings on the drives. This explains how to do what you want to achieve.

As the smaller drive is drawing power from the USB port, make sure you aren't overloading it.

[chonasdad]

Thankyou very much. I shall try this today and, weather permitting, come back tomorrow to tell you how I got on.

[chonasdad]

Hello again. Your advice has solved the problem with the 3.5" pc hard drives, I just had to set the master jumpers. But the laptop drives are still at location 0 so I can´t find them listed. Am I able to solve this or does it boil down to the laptop drives drawing too much power? chonasdad

[arraknid]

The first, most obvious, question is are you sure the drive is OK? Try plugging it into another machine and see if it works there. If so, reconnect to your machine, go to Disk Manager and check to see if it appears there. If yes, right click it and assign a drive letter. To access Disk Manager type the following into the Run box diskmgmt.msc and then OK.

Another thing to try is to download TweakUI a free utility from Microsoft. Run it and go to My Computer then Drives. Make sure all boxes are ticked.

Let us know what happens.

[chonasdad]

Thanks. The laptop drives are working because I removed them from my laptop a while ago to upgrade. Actually I did have one defective one but that leaves two to use externally. Anyway i´ll try what you said and get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks again. chonasdad

[arraknid]

Plugging into another machine will also check that the drive housing is working OK, so worth a try.

[chonasdad]

Okay I tried attaching the laptop drives to my friends computer and the same thing happened. They did install but because they were at Location 0, I couldn´t find them. I also checked the disk management item as you said and the external laptop drives were listed, but I couldn´t get them to work.
In addition I tried one in my laptop, reinstalled XP and it worked. So, I guess the problem is simply that the external drive bay is possibly faulty. Would that be correct?

[arraknid]

Certainly looks that way. If you purchased it recently, take it back and get them to test it.

Good luck.