My external Hard Drive Homemade not working?

Question

I have an external hard drive with it's own power source. The enclose case for the hard drive is 3.5" USB2.0 TO SATA/ IDE HDD CASE serial ATA. And the 500 gb hard drive is a barracuda 7200.11. I tried the external hdd on windows xp, vista, and 7 but they all say "did not recognize this device" I tried windows update countless times to find a driver, but that says cannot find driver. The funny this is if I connect the external hdd in ubuntu it works just fine. What can I do to make this thing work in Windows? And why does it work in Ubuntu and not Windows? Am I missing something? Can I take the stuff from Ubuntu and make it work in Windows?

Answer 1

I do what you do but with lots of different drives and sometimes My sata/ide to USB adapter just does not work. I have a few other adapters that I use when my main one does not. Its just about finding the right combination.



After a while the device manager needs cleaning out it seems and after that, it helps. You need to enable OFFLINE or Ghosted hidden devices to do it properly.

1. Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt.

2. At a command prompt, type the following command , and then press ENTER:

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1

3. Type the following command a command prompt, and then press ENTER:

start devmgmt.msc

4. Troubleshoot the devices and drivers in Device Manager.



NOTE: Click Show hidden devices on the View menu in Device Managers before you can see devices that are not connected to the computer.

5. When you finish troubleshooting, close Device Manager.

6. Type exit at the command prompt.



Note that when you close the command prompt window, Window clears the devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 variable that you set in step 2 and prevents ghosted devices from being displayed when you click Show hidden devices.



If you are a developer or power user and you want to be able to view devices that are not connected to your computer, set this environment variable globally:



1. Right-click My Computer.

2. Click Properties.

3. Click the Advanced tab.

4. Click the Environment Variables tab.

5. Set the variables in the System Variables box.



NOTE: Use this method only for troubleshooting or development purposes, or to prevent users from accidentally uninstalling a required device that is not connected to the computer (such as a USB device or docking station that is not connected to a laptop computer).

Answer 2

but in my computer it shows as "Removable Disc F: You said you had attached a hard drive. It should NOT say removeable Disc. Lets start at the beginning. I understand that you attached a hard drive in an enclosure and connected it to you computer via an usb cable. Could you post the model of the external HD? IS it SATA or PATA (should not really matter)? With the external drive attached, when you turn your computer on can you go to the bios (press Del, or esc, or F8) it will say on the screen VERY briefly which, and see what it says about your drives and usb; usb is enabled isn't it? In device manager is there also a yellow exclamation point on it? Click on the device and check out the status. Is it enabled, try to troubleshoot it if that is offered. See the link below for troubleshooting unknown device. For some reason your computer thinksyour hard drive is a removeable drive. If it does the same with a laptop hard drive it is not probably due to the huge size of the HD. If the computer can access the flash drive usb is working o.k. Could you install the big hard drive inside the computer as a slave? Good luck I have heard that there some people are having success with this problem by Go to Control Panel > Admin Tools > Computer Management >Storage >Disk Management > locate external usb drive.Sometimes the drive letters get messed up and you have to manually assign a drive letter. Usually better to use the letter J or higher.

Answer 3

When you check it in Ubuntu, do you safely remove it before disconnecting. If not the state of the hard drive may be left open and no Windows will ever see it. Also if it has been partitioned for Linux, Windows will never see it also. Understand one benefit to Linux, it works right at the hardware level and just about any thing you plug in USB ports will be recognized, almost. Windows does not work at the hardware level, unless you install all kinds of drivers to drop it down to that level, with the exception of formatting the hard drives. One test you can do if you are dual booting, go into Linux, open my computer and open the partition Windows is on, then go there and see if it will show the external hard drive.

Answer 4

This is probably not the issue, but do you ever change the services in adminstrative tools? You want to make sure the service that detects plug and play devices is automatically started.

Answer 5

what is its file system? i guess it uses the ext3 or XFS file system. that's why windows won't recognize it but ubuntu does.

Answer 6

i think it should be formatted in either FAT or NTFS to run properly for windows