Vista won't recognize External Hard Drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Frank Bright
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Frank Bright

Hi - I'm on Vista Home Premium and I have a Maxtor One Touch II USB external
hard drive...

Vista does Not see or recognize the hard drive in 'My Computer', but it does
show up in the Device Manager and it shows that it is "working properly".

Is there a way I can rectify this so that the external drive shows up in 'My
Computer'? I have not had any problems with this drive during any of my
former Vista installs.

Many Thanks for any help,...Frank
 
Frank said:
Hi - I'm on Vista Home Premium and I have a Maxtor One Touch II USB
external hard drive...

Vista does Not see or recognize the hard drive in 'My Computer', but it
does show up in the Device Manager and it shows that it is "working
properly".

Is there a way I can rectify this so that the external drive shows up in
'My Computer'? I have not had any problems with this drive during any of
my former Vista installs.

Many Thanks for any help,...Frank
Click to expand...

Go to Start/Administrative tools/computer management/disk management and
right click on the drive and select "mark partition as active".
Frank
 
Ok, I have gone into Disk Management, but the only options I have on a
right-click is to do 'simple volume' or 'Convert to a GPT disk' or 'Convert
to Dynamic Disk'
and if I'm not mistaken, some of these will reformat my drive and I'll lose
all my data.

Many Thanks for any other suggestions, Frank
 
Frank said:
Ok, I have gone into Disk Management, but the only options I have on a
right-click is to do 'simple volume' or 'Convert to a GPT disk' or
'Convert to Dynamic Disk'
and if I'm not mistaken, some of these will reformat my drive and I'll
lose all my data.

Many Thanks for any other suggestions, Frank
Click to expand...
You're right clicking on the part where it says "Disk 0, Disk 1, etc.
You need to right click on the long area next to that then you'll see
"mark partition active".
Frank
 
Actually I've right-clicked on both of those areas already but I'll try
again, Frank
 
Help! I'm stuck now. Ok, I actually tried the 'make simple volume' option
and then chose not to format the drive.

Then in the upper section, I WAS able to right-click it and choose ' Make
active partition'.

Now it shows up in 'My Computer' but it won't let me access the drive
without formatting it. Of course, I'd lose all my data if I did that. So I'm
stuck...

Please advise further if you can, Thanks, Frank
 
Frank said:
Help! I'm stuck now. Ok, I actually tried the 'make simple volume'
option and then chose not to format the drive.

Then in the upper section, I WAS able to right-click it and choose '
Make active partition'.

Now it shows up in 'My Computer' but it won't let me access the drive
without formatting it. Of course, I'd lose all my data if I did that. So
I'm stuck...

Please advise further if you can, Thanks, Frank
Click to expand...
Hummm...not a good move. You might try unplugging it and then plugging
it into a different USB port.
Then go back into disk management a set it to active.
Frank
 
Yes I found out that this was a bad move....I'm currently doing a file
recovery demo with trial Seagate Recovery software to see what is
retrievable.

Apparently, I may have corrupted the partition somehow. But on the lighter
side, the Maxtor rep said that if what I first saw in Disk Management said
'Unallocated' (which is indeed what I first saw before I tried anything),
then the partition was probably already corrupted at that point.

Maybe she was trying to make me feel better...and it worked!
Frank
 
Frank said:
Yes I found out that this was a bad move....I'm currently doing a file
recovery demo with trial Seagate Recovery software to see what is
retrievable.

Apparently, I may have corrupted the partition somehow. But on the
lighter side, the Maxtor rep said that if what I first saw in Disk
Management said 'Unallocated' (which is indeed what I first saw before I
tried anything), then the partition was probably already corrupted at
that point.

Maybe she was trying to make me feel better...and it worked!
Frank
Click to expand...
lets us know how it all works out.
Frank
 
It looks like I've recovered my data, but it took purchasing a data recovery
program to do it.

One take on this is: It's a good thing to own a data recovery program, so
I'm better off for it.

But it's still slightly uncertain what really happened in this, although I
accept that it very well might have been my fault.

I've reformatted the drive successfully and am putting the data back on it,
so next I'll hook it up to my Vista computer and see if Vista recognizes the
drive this time.

Thanks, Frank
 
Good to hear that you got back your data. I got in the same situation
in last month, lost data will upgrading to windows vista. I used
Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS data recovery software. And was delighted
to get back all of my data. At first I was under impression that it
won't be able to pull 100% of the data back. But it worked perfectly
well.

Data recovery software and services: http://www.stellarinfo.com
 
Hummm...not a good move. You might try unplugging it and then plugging
it into a different USB port.
Then go back into disk management a set it to active. Frank
Click to expand...

Aw gee Frank, I'm not sure this is the best advice. I can't speak with
assurance for Vista but in the past there could only be one active
partition per system and it had to be on the boot drive. I'm not sure what
might happen if one actually manages to make a removable drive have the
active partition if it is a backup drive and not always connected. My
guess would be that the machine would become unbootable until one
could reset the boot drive as the active partition so Windows can find
boot.ini and ntdlr and ntdetect.com. So, I ask, are you sure?

To Frank B.: My understanding of unallocated would be space not in a
partition yet. Which doesn't make any sense if this is your backup. It
probably wouldn't show up everywhere if it wasn't formatted but like
before, this was your backup so it must have been formatted, it had data.
Too late to troubleshoot further, but I would like to hear what happens
when you plug the "recovered" drive in. Was it a backup of one of your
other Vista installs?
 
Aw gee Frank, I'm not sure this is the best advice. I can't speak with
assurance for Vista but in the past there could only be one active
partition per system and it had to be on the boot drive. I'm not sure what
might happen if one actually manages to make a removable drive have the
active partition if it is a backup drive and not always connected. My
guess would be that the machine would become unbootable until one
could reset the boot drive as the active partition so Windows can find
boot.ini and ntdlr and ntdetect.com. So, I ask, are you sure?
Click to expand...

Well I was curious... I have lots of external drives. Right now, none
are on. So I peeked in Disk Management (from Control Panel,
Administrative, Computer Management) and as you would expect my root
drive (C) is shown as the primary and active partition.

But... I just turned on one of my external drives and it too under
Disk Management shows as active and as the primary partition while my
C drive remains also as primary and active.

Hmm...

Turned on a second external drive, it too shows active and primary. So
right now I have three partitions all active, all on different drives
all showing as the primary which seems strange, but they work fine. I
didn't think Windows would allow that either. Live and learn.

Reaching back into a dark corner of my memory I seem to recall when
setting up the external drives in their enclosers that you had to make
such a drive both active and primary or Windows wouldn't see it as a
drive at all, could be wrong, I'm fuzzy on this.

Anybody else see anything different?
 
Rodney wrote:

Aw gee Frank, I'm not sure this is the best advice. I can't speak with
assurance for Vista but in the past there could only be one active
partition per system and it had to be on the boot drive. I'm not sure what
might happen if one actually manages to make a removable drive have the
active partition if it is a backup drive and not always connected. My
guess would be that the machine would become unbootable until one
could reset the boot drive as the active partition so Windows can find
boot.ini and ntdlr and ntdetect.com. So, I ask, are you sure?
Click to expand...

Maybe you're confusing a partitioned HDD with separate HDD's. Obviously,
only one partition per HDD can be set to "active", but separate HDD's
must have "active" partitions in order to be seen by the OS.
I have three HDD's on this machine. The boot HDD has two partitions on
it and only one is set to "active". The other two HDD's have only one
partition each and both are "active".
Frank
 
Previous PC with Vista has no problem with this external drive until I
move to other PC and it regonise it but does not show up in My Computer.


However I fixed this by assigning drive "A".

I don't know why, it is FAT32, not NTFS (Vista).

Good luck.

Riscy
Click to expand...

FAT32 and NTFS are file systems, and can be used by different operating
systems. It has nothing to do with Vista in a direct sense.

Do not assign the letters A: and B: to external drives unless they are
floppy drives. Also don't use any preexisting letters such as C: - that
would be bad too.
 
I fixed the problem as I have too many drive letter from C to X, so I
designated the drive to A and that all fixed the problem.
Click to expand...

As I said already, A: is reserved for floppies.

If you have so many drive letters, I suggest that you need to indulge in
some organization exercises.
 
Gene E. Bloch said:
FAT32 and NTFS are file systems, and can be used by different
operating
systems. It has nothing to do with Vista in a direct sense.

Do not assign the letters A: and B: to external drives unless they
are
floppy drives. Also don't use any preexisting letters such as C: -
that
would be bad too.
Click to expand...

I understand that by convention A: and B: are reserved for floppies,
but is there any real / technical reason to avoid using them for other
external drives? For that matter, is there a real / technical reason
to avoid using them for other drives (like network drive mappings,
etc.)?

--
Zaphod

Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster: A cocktail based on Janx Spirit.
The effect of one is like having your brain smashed out
by a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.
 
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