Calling all bitheads

Shooter

Shooter

Living life on the heavies.
Joined
Mar 15, 2006
Messages
3,554
Location
Louisville, KY
AS some of you know I fixed up an old laptop so now I have three laptop hard drives. I bought three 2.5 inch hard drive enclosures and have hooked them all up to no avail.

The light comes on but no one is home.

Basically it is an enclosure that allows you to hook up an external hard drive via a USB cable. The hard drives have XP installed. I have done nothing to them except take them out of the laptop and put them into this enclosure.

I would think it would be plug and play.

HELP!!!
 
Are the drives even recognized by your computer?

If you are trying to boot from the USB drive, then you may have to go into your BIOS and change the settings to allow for external hard drive functions.
 
On the mamachine go to:

Start
Control Panel
Administrative Tools
Computer Management
Disk Management.

If your external drives are shown as healthy then you should be able to access them. If they are not shown then you may need to turn on a bios setting or DL a driver to get the USB drives to work. I'd bet on a bios setting but since I don't have a clue about your machine I can't say for sure.

You must be logged on as an Administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to use the Disk Management utility. Before a new, un-partitioned disk can be used in Windows XP it must contain a disk signature. The first time that Disk Management is run after a new hard disk is installed, the Disk Signature and Upgrade Disk Wizard is started. If the wizard is cancelled, you may find that when you attempt to create a partition on the new hard disk, the New Partition option is unavailable (appears dimmed). In this case a signature can be written on the hard drive by right clicking on the disk description window (lower pane, typically a red circle with a white dash covering the hard drive icon) and selecting Initialize Disk.

Shooter said:
AS some of you know I fixed up an old laptop so now I have three laptop hard drives. I bought three 2.5 inch hard drive enclosures and have hooked them all up to no avail.

The light comes on but no one is home.

Basically it is an enclosure that allows you to hook up an external hard drive via a USB cable. The hard drives have XP installed. I have done nothing to them except take them out of the laptop and put them into this enclosure.

I would think it would be plug and play.

HELP!!!
Click to expand...
 
It depends on the firmware in the external drive enclosures.

Shooter, I have a little IDE -> USB adapter I can drop in the mail to you that allows you to do the same thing without using an external enclosure. You plug it into your drives, your USB port, and off you go. I've used it several times, with notebook drives, and you don't have to enable squat in disk manager nor any other fooling around in control panel to get it to work. It comes up as a native USB device and seems to work perfectly, though a little slow.

Not sure what firmware is in those external enclosures, but I know what's in the one I have, and I know it works..... :thumbs:

Hmm....if you are trying to use a laptop to power these enclosures (or even my adapter) you may be running into a USB power limit for the notebook USB ports. You'd think a USB port is a USB port, period but something sticks in my mind telling me that may not be so. I'll dig around in the specs tomorrow while I'm at work... :cool:

Keep in touch....we'll get there.....B.B.S.
 
Here's what I got

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16817145329

I just took the hard drive out of my old laptop, dropped it in and plugged it up. The light came on and thats it. Now it come with a disc the size of a 50 piece with drivers on it, but when I run it the install program locks up, when the hard drive is hooked up and when it is not. I guess the software is from ULI, anyway it locks up with a "severe error" and says it cannot install un_ULIchipset.
 
Shane, I was told by more than one geek that booting up your OS from an external HD is a bad idea because of power issues and slow transfer rates. XP takes up 4-5 Gigs of space that can be used to store files. I honestly don't know how to run a copy of XP on an external HD.

If you cannot figure this out, pop the old HD back into your PC and transfer whatever files you want saved into another HD that is formatted to hold data only. I think you can do this by inserting your copy of XP and going through the start of installation until it comes up to a point where it reads your external HD and asks you to re-format it.

I think that's what you do. . .someone else who's tech savvy chime in here and help me. ???
 
Are you sure that your old laptop has USB 2.0 ports? You need 2.0 to use those enclosures.
 
NOt sure about laptop hard drives, but if they have jumpers, you may have to change them so that the drive operates in slave mode.
 
That shouldn't matter since it isn't using the IDE cable. USB has a different control system.

bilder said:
NOt sure about laptop hard drives, but if they have jumpers, you may have to change them so that the drive operates in slave mode.
Click to expand...
 
AVB said:
Are you sure that your old laptop has USB 2.0 ports? You need 2.0 to use those enclosures.
Click to expand...

x2

This was my first thought after wondering about the bios settings. Some older pc bios' do not boot from USB.
Scratch that - you are not booting from USB.

Did you try plugging in the drive AFTER the pc was up and running?
 
grateful1 said:
AVB said:
Are you sure that your old laptop has USB 2.0 ports? You need 2.0 to use those enclosures.
Click to expand...

x2

This was my first thought after wondering about the bios settings. Some older pc bios' do not boot from USB.
Scratch that - you are not booting from USB.

Did you try plugging in the drive AFTER the pc was up and running?
Click to expand...

Yep, plug in AFTER boot up. Also, what AVB says. The port must be USB 2.0. If it works, you should get a new hardware discovery. Whats the make and model of the notebook again?

edit: one more thing - my HP has both 2.0 and 1.0 ports. 2.0 in the back and a couple of 1.0 on the side. My docking station is 1.0 only. So, try every port you have, leave it plugged in for about 20 seconds. If its 2.0, you should be lookin at your logs.
 
NullSmurf said:
grateful1 said:
AVB said:
Are you sure that your old laptop has USB 2.0 ports? You need 2.0 to use those enclosures.
Click to expand...

x2

This was my first thought after wondering about the bios settings. Some older pc bios' do not boot from USB.
Scratch that - you are not booting from USB.

Did you try plugging in the drive AFTER the pc was up and running?
Click to expand...

Yep, plug in AFTER boot up. Also, what AVB says. The port must be USB 2.0. If it works, you should get a new hardware discovery. Whats the make and model of the notebook again?

edit: one more thing - my HP has both 2.0 and 1.0 ports. 2.0 in the back and a couple of 1.0 on the side. My docking station is 1.0 only. So, try every port you have, leave it plugged in for about 20 seconds. If its 2.0, you should be lookin at your logs.
Click to expand...

2.0 for sure its a sony pcg-z1va and I have a dell inspirion 1150, tried it on both, and nothing.
 
I have the same problem... I bought a different enclosure, but same symptoms, lights are on, but nobody is home.

My guess is that my drive while being an ata 100 in fact needs an ide interface or some sh*t like that. I thought they were interchangeable, but... I haven't had the time to keep up on PC's like I used to.

Anyway, good luck! I just swap out the drive on occasion when I really need something (usually work related).
 
Will it function on a desktop? You can always transfer the data to a desktop, burn to a CD and then put it on whatever computer you wish.
 
Well I ran across a guy who said he had too use external power from his PSP (playstation portable) to get his hard drive to spool up, I plugged it in and my computer recognized it. We are getting somewhere now.

Got the thing recognized, guess the usb ports were not giving up enough power. Still have some glitches I am working through.

Working on my log book as I type this.

Thanks for the help thus far.

Shane
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top