My Computer won't recognise my External Hard Drive

**marcz2007** · May 23rd, 2009, 09:08 AM

Hi, I'm running vista ultimate andI connected my Western Digital 1TB hard drive through a USB port. It recognises when I plug it in and when its in as it makes a noise and the safety removal hard ware appears. But My Computor won't recognise it and when I try and mount it through Changing drive letter and path the option to change the drive letter is greyed out. Any ideas?

**Mels_Smileys45** · May 23rd, 2009, 10:32 AM

Try something for me...

click "start" and go into your "control panel" Then go into Administrative Tools and click " Disc Management " and see if your drive is there. You may need to click on it and enable it.

**marcz2007** · May 23rd, 2009, 10:38 AM

Ok trying that now thanks for the quick reply

**marcz2007** · May 23rd, 2009, 10:43 AM

Where is disc management as it isn't under Administrative tools?

**marcz2007** · May 23rd, 2009, 10:59 AM

Sorry about that found disk management and my hard drive is there it has no drive allocated and a 828.07 of primary partition and 103.25 unallocated space. And the option to change drive letters and paths is greyed out.

**Mels_Smileys45** · May 23rd, 2009, 11:24 AM

Did you buy this as an external drive or did you buy this hard drive and put it into an enclosure?

I do not have Vista so I will not be able to guide you exactly but try this. Go back to the control panel and go into "System" and click on "hardware" and then "device manager". Find the "mass storage device" under "USB Controller". Click on the mass storage device and try to enable it. If it already enabled try to disable it and then re-enable it. Let me/us know what happens next...

Also when you go into device manager let us know if there is an exclamation mark beside the device.

:bigeyes2:

**marcz2007** · May 23rd, 2009, 07:01 PM

Thanks for your help but I think I've fixed it. I had to partition it and format that partition to MS DOS (FAT) and it worked. Would of preferred to have done it without having to partition it though.

**marcz2007** · May 23rd, 2009, 08:58 PM

Your help would still be gratefully appreciated. So to answer your questions, it is an external hard drive. Under device manager it is shown and had an exclamation mark next to it but then I disabled and re-enabled it, after that it started insatalling 11 files under the vista installation and then restarted but I still can't find the drive.

By the way I could see the drive after I partitioned it and made it to MS DOS (FAT) format but I'm using a mac and it would be better if I didn't have to have it as that format. Also, it worked when I had windows xp but on vista it isn't. Thanks for your help!

**Mels_Smileys45** · May 23rd, 2009, 09:19 PM

There is your problem my man. You need to reformat it using your mac as I have heard that a mac will have trouble reading an external that was formatted using a PC. From what I know about macs, which is limited, I think macs can only read from NTFS formatted drives but not write. Im guessing youre running windows on your mac so I don't know how the formats behave under that instance. I wish someone with knowledge of this would speak up but everyone is strangely silent today. If you format to FAT32 is should be fine. That should solve all your problems I think.

**marcz2007** · May 24th, 2009, 04:05 AM

The main problem with FAT 32 is the famous mac error code 0 : which means for some reason you can only add 4gb of data at one time. This is bad as I have isos and dmgs which take up about 10 or 12 gb. Is there a way to move them over without damaging them?