I Need Help! I bought a Firelite External 40GB Hard Drive

[PowerMan57two]

Okay so I went to Best Buy today and bought one of those 40GB Firelite hard drives. it's just a small little hard drive that plugs right into my laptop thru USB port. My laptop is brand new as well. It's a Sony Vaio FS series.

It's suppose to be plug n play and no drivers required for windows XP. I plugged in my hard drive and it did not pop up on my screen. I went to My Computer and it's not under there. I try restarting the computer a million times and it's still not there.

Now this is what I did. I right clicked on My Computer and went to Manage. Once here I went down to Disk Management. I can see my C:\ drive and then I saw FIRELITE right below that. I right clicked on that and assigned it the letter F:\

Now when I right click on F:\ under Disk Management I can click open and put files on the hard disk. However, the F:\ drive STILL doesn't show up in My Computer!! How do I add this to My Computer or a shortcut onto my desktop? I checked out there website and there was no help and it didn't come with any manuals because it's suppose to work when you plug it in.

[White Crow]

The best advice I can give you is to do more trial and error. Before you start tinkering around with settings, I reccomend making a system restore back-up. If you still can't figure it out, save you system restore back-up, wait for more responses, and experiment if they sound well compiled. Thankyou.

[PowerMan57two]

Well this blows. it's suppose to be plug n play and it's becoming to be a project to get this dumb thing to work!

[bobhss]

It may be underpowered by your laptop. The USB ports on it may not have enough power coming through them to operate the external drive. I would suggest trying to hook up the drive to a Windows XP desktop computer and see if it recognizes it fine there. That'll make sure that your external drive works by itself.

[Krell]

Ok . . .

For one, you must have a partition

You must format the drive

Right click, chose SIMPLE, Format NTFS

Now, under SERVICES - make sure that the "Removable Storage" is running and set to Auto.

Reboot


.

[Mels_Smileys45]

Now when I right click on F:\ under Disk Management I can click open and put files on the hard disk.

It seems powerman is already putting files on the disc, he just needs a shortcut?

[Krell]

No, I was repetitive on purpose

I cant verify anything he says, and I want him cover all the bases, but ESP the removable storage service, and reboot

he should have an icon for the removable storage on his system tray - to safely remove etc


.

[Stownplayer]

Also, check that the windows service that controls plug n play stuff is running. here is a little discription. http://www.theeldergeek.com/plug_and_play.htm

[muffenme]

With the pc on, when you plug in the hard drive into the USB port it should display a box that says "Found new hardware" then it hould say "Found USB Massive Storage Device" then close.

Next it should say "Found New hardware" then it should display the hard drive that Firelite used in there system. Usely the hard drive should be preformated so unless you got an odd pc, it should work right away unless there something wrong with the drive itself, either the USB to IDE or the Hard Drive. If you used another USB drive on you computer and it worked then it could be a defect in this drive, return it where you bough it from with all packages and prof. that you bough it from them.