External HDD Won't Mount.

[chsmadden]

Okay, this has been plaguing me for quite a while now.
I have an external USB hard drive. It used to be the case that the drive would show up no problem in Vista. Now, nothing. I recently did a format and install (couple days ago) and I plugged in the drive. I got the notification bubble about installing the device driver, then the bubble saying "Your hardware is ready to use." I go to the computer window, nothing. The drive spins up and mounts just fine on my Macbook, and Vista will pick up my flash drive just fine, just this drive will not mount to only that computer.

Also, if I take the drive out of the adapter and plug it straight into the computer (via SATA) it still doesn't show up, and neither will the 120gb mobile drive I have sitting around. So I have no way of moving large (more than 1gb) files from computer to computer.

 

[Ayson]

Try this. Plug in the drive, switch it on etc.... Let the USB device get recognised.

Now right click Computer>>Manage>>Continue.

Now in the Computer Management window,in the pane on the left, under Storage, click Disk Management. Now see if your drive shows up there. If its does, it may say "not intialised" if it does, right click it>>Initialise disk. Choose MBR. Now it should show up in My computer.

Ill look up some page where they have screenchots.

 

[Ayson]

Couldn't find the right page.
Here's a screenshot. My drive is alredy initialized so it won't be the same.

 

[chsmadden]

Thanks for the tip. Just to be sure, initialize doesn't mean erase disc, right? I had some bad "initialization" experiences in Mac OS 9.2.

 

[Ayson]

Im pretty sure it wont erase, but maybe you should wait for someone to confirm. I have not initialized a disk with data before.

 

[Frostmourne]

It will and if it doesn't it might corrupt the files system. Back everything up, and then reformat as NTFS.