USB Mass Storage

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Vista Ultimate
Seagate 500GB USB2 Drive

Where you can see the drive:
Drive shows-up under disk drives in Device Manager (working).
You can see it (sans drive designation (i.e. "D:," etc.)) in the "Safely
Remove Hardware" area.
You can even see it as an "unallocated" drive in the lower pane of the "Disk
Management" utility.

Where you can't see the drive:
Doesn't appear under "My Computer."
Doesn't appear in the upper pane of the "Disk Management" screen where
drives are listed by their drive designation.

Bottom line, because of the places the drive can't be seen it is not
accessible. Need some help badly.

Bill
 
You have to partition and format the drive partitions before it will show up
in Explorer and be able to be used. The fact that you have unallocated space
tells me that you have not done this yet. A fully partitioned and formatted
drive will have NO unallocated space.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
You've answered your own question and didn't know you did. Your USB drive
needs to be allocated (partitioned) and formatted to appear with a drive
letter. I use Disk Management where I can set an explicit drive letter when
I do the partitioning and formatting.

Bye.
 
Drive partitioned and formatted. Came out of the box that way with XP and
then Vista Business recognizing it immediately. Even has data on it from
backing-up XP to install Vista.

Been using it for a couple of weeks now (not a boot drive obviously), but
then I had a problem with my RAID1 array and had to break one of the disks
out as an SATA boot drive (worked fine with no loss of bootability or data on
that drive) and after doing that the USB drive has had this problem, even
after upgrading to Vista Ultimate (from Business).
 
Drive partitioned and formatted. Came out of the box that way with XP and
then Vista Business recognizing it immediately. Even has data on it from
backing-up XP to install Vista.

Been using it for a couple of weeks now (not a boot drive obviously), but
then I had a problem with my RAID1 array and had to break one of the disks
out as an SATA boot drive (worked fine with no loss of bootability or data on
that drive) and after doing that the USB drive has had this problem, even
after upgrading to Vista Ultimate (from Business).
 
If you are seeing the drive space as unallocated - all partitions are gone.
Time to start fresh.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
Bill said:
Drive partitioned and formatted. Came out of the box that way with XP and
then Vista Business recognizing it immediately. Even has data on it from
backing-up XP to install Vista.

Been using it for a couple of weeks now (not a boot drive obviously), but
then I had a problem with my RAID1 array and had to break one of the disks
out as an SATA boot drive (worked fine with no loss of bootability or data on
that drive) and after doing that the USB drive has had this problem, even
after upgrading to Vista Ultimate (from Business).
Click to expand...
Was this drive part of the RAID array?
 
No, this was strictly a USB data storage drive that existed on a machine that
had a raid array.
 
So what the heck did Vista do to it.

This drive was working perfectly (it is brand new) under XP and then under
Vista for 1-week. As it is a storage drive it is not like it was getting
pounded daily and now all of a sudden it is wiped. What happened?
 
You installed the drive yourself in an external case?

I have had to discard 4 different brands of external cases now as being not
compatible with Vista. I now use only Adaptec cases (you know, the ones that
cost 4 times the amount that you pay for the no name/little known brands you
can get at a computer fair). I have never had any problems with an Adaptec
external hard drive case.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
No Richard, this is a pre-packaged Seagate 500GB USB2 storage drive,
pre-formatted and ready to go out of the box.

And again, it was working fine with my machine running both XP and Vista
Business for about 2-weeks. I used it to back-up my XP installation before
wiping and moving to Vista Business and then moved by documents from there
back into my Vista installation after the upgrade. It was working, but now is
not working.
 
Vista Ultimate
Seagate 500GB USB2 Drive

Where you can see the drive:
Drive shows-up under disk drives in Device Manager (working).
You can see it (sans drive designation (i.e. "D:," etc.)) in the "Safely
Remove Hardware" area.
You can even see it as an "unallocated" drive in the lower pane of the "Disk
Management" utility.

Where you can't see the drive:
Doesn't appear under "My Computer."
Doesn't appear in the upper pane of the "Disk Management" screen where
drives are listed by their drive designation.

Bottom line, because of the places the drive can't be seen it is not
accessible. Need some help badly.

Bill
Click to expand...

Try running a program such as PC INSPECTOR File Recovery
<http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm> or
TestDisk <http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk>.
 
Now I'm getting the information I need (finally). (-:

I have had three different Seagate external drives, the ones that are
rectangular and can be stacked, that have had that problem. They come from
the factory formatted as fat32.

The partition bit, what id's what type of partition is on the drive, gets
changed. The drive looks empty. I have been able to get these drives back to
working order by using ptedit from a DOS boot floppy. But the problem
re-occurs, again and again.

I finally just formatted these drives as NTFS and never had another problem
with them.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
Richard, from the instructions I can find "ptedit.exe" seems normally be used
to restore a boot drive. Can you point me to some instructions on how to use
it restore my external USB be dirve in this situation? Thanks...
 
You "may" be right. It is a while since I used it. If you contact me I will
send you the Windows version in a zip file. It is small (under 400k). You
have to run it in administrator mode. It will see all the drives you have
connected. But then, I am almost certain that the DOS version does also.
There is a drop down to choose your drive.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
Hi Bill,
An identical thing has happened to me I believe. Been usin a freecom USB
external drive for a week on Vista, now I plug it in and it shows every where
(?) exept as a link off Computer. Makes it unusable!
Did you find a solution?
Lee
 
No

Lee said:
Hi Bill,
An identical thing has happened to me I believe. Been usin a freecom USB
external drive for a week on Vista, now I plug it in and it shows every where
(?) exept as a link off Computer. Makes it unusable!
Did you find a solution?
Lee
Click to expand...
 
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