external HD enclosure-fitted Seagate 160gb

  • Thread starter Thread starter elltell
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E

elltell

taken from computer with failed motherboard- will not work in Vista home
premium.
It is recognised in drive list but will not open.
Enclosure supplier stated that Vista will not recognise as it was FAT 32.
Any ideas on this problem?
 
Hi,

Vista has no problems with reading/writing to a FAT32 drive. Run disk
manager (diskmgmt.msc) and see if the drive is detected and how it is seen.
You might try the function to import a foreign disk.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
 
elltell said:
taken from computer with failed motherboard- will not work in Vista home
premium.
It is recognised in drive list but will not open.
Enclosure supplier stated that Vista will not recognise as it was FAT 32.
Any ideas on this problem?
Click to expand...

What do you hope to achieve by using this drive? Right now, if the
drive's hardware is sound, then you don't have a problem.

If your end purpose is to utilize the drive for extra storage space, and
you don't need any of the information on it, just reformat the drive.

If you wish to retrieve information off the drive then you will need
appropriate software to read the drive, or install it in another
computer or use one of the Linux Live CD distributions.
 
Rick said:
Hi,

Vista has no problems with reading/writing to a FAT32 drive. Run disk
manager (diskmgmt.msc) and see if the drive is detected and how it is
seen. You might try the function to import a foreign disk.
Click to expand...


Ahhh...thanks for posting this fact, Rick....I thought it was strange
that Vista couldn't read FAT32 (as per the OP post). Cheers! :-)
 
Thankyou for your reply, but one cannot format a drive unless you can enter
the format instruction, and if you are'nt able to enter the drive then it
will not be able to be formatted. Also I stated the drive showed up on
connecting to my pc but it does not show now when connected and switched on.
In answer to your other question regarding its purpose which would be to use
this as an external back up.
I neglected to say that when the motherboard packed up on the previous
computer [ e-machine ] I was told that I would lose all information on the
drive.
I then bought a enclosure and find that I still can't access the drive.
I have the rescue discs that contain the drive info and tried them in my
ADVENT PC but this did not help.
Do you think that using another pc with a different platform would help?
 
If you want to recover some valuable data from the drive you can
probably do so using a Linux Live CD which can be used by itself without
affecting you present setup. This will involve downloading a
distribution and burning it to a CD. On the other hand you could take
the drive to a computer store (Probably not Best Buy but a smaller
independent one) and ask their advice. Aside from the cost of a CD the
first solution is free, the second probably won't be.

As to why the drive is not showing up, well, there might be
justification for a visit to a store, they most likely will have
diagnostic experience and tools and can probably suggest the best way to
proceed.

If you want to try yourself you can try downloading a CD image from here...

http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download

http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_ionfiles&Itemid=28

Burn the image to CD, boot from the CD and you should have an
operational system running from CD without installing anything. Don;t
select any options to "Install", just see if you can locate the drive.
For Ubuntu click "Computer".


Thankyou for your reply, but one cannot format a drive unless you can enter
the format instruction, and if you are'nt able to enter the drive then it
will not be able to be formatted. Also I stated the drive showed up on
connecting to my pc but it does not show now when connected and switched on.
In answer to your other question regarding its purpose which would be to use
this as an external back up.
I neglected to say that when the motherboard packed up on the previous
computer [ e-machine ] I was told that I would lose all information on the
drive.
I then bought a enclosure and find that I still can't access the drive.
I have the rescue discs that contain the drive info and tried them in my
ADVENT PC but this did not help.
Do you think that using another pc with a different platform would help?

man said:
What do you hope to achieve by using this drive? Right now, if the
drive's hardware is sound, then you don't have a problem.

If your end purpose is to utilize the drive for extra storage space, and
you don't need any of the information on it, just reformat the drive.

If you wish to retrieve information off the drive then you will need
appropriate software to read the drive, or install it in another
computer or use one of the Linux Live CD distributions.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
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