External hard drive for laptops

so i went out an bought an 80gig external hard disk (drive?)… plugged it in to my less than a year old laptop and the thing doesn’t work. windows XP recognizes it… tells me new hardware was found and ready to use… then I go to My COmputer… click on it’s icon (in my case it ends up being G: drive) but it tells me to insert a disk. :s

I tried right clicking on it and selecting the format option but it won’t do it.

:help:

Have a look here, bushibanned…
[forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.ph … highlight=](External Hard Drive installation question

(Especially Andre’s advice)

:notworthy: thanks! :laughing:

I don’t know if you’ve solved the problem, but when I tried to install an external hard drive recently it wouldn’t connect either. I finally removed the master/slave jumper on the back of the hard drive and I’ve had no problems since.

i don’t even know what that is… :blush:

:frowning: ok i followed all the advice in the link I was given. nothing is working.

I went to system ->hardware->device manager->disk drives and selected the external one… went to volumes->populate and after clicking on populate there is NO option to allocate or initialize and the drive still doesn’t come up on my computer…

took the bloody thing apart… doesn’t look like there is anything to move or switch on the inside. have no idea what a master/slave jumper looks like so i’m not keen on just randomly picking off parts…

:help:

Ok, have you tried the easy option? You said that it shows up as a drive in the My Computer part of Windows. If you right-click on that, do you have the option to “format”? (You’ll have to choose NTFS for the file system format, since it’s quite big.)

:yay:

wooo hooo!!! and I thought I couldn’t operate anything after Nintendo…

went to control panel -> administrative tools -> computer management -> disk management and VOILA!!! The beast is initializing now…

now that it will be formatted etc… can it be plugged into ANY laptop?

wooo hooo!!! and I thought I couldn’t operate anything after Nintendo…

went to control panel -> administrative tools -> computer management -> disk management and VOILA!!! The beast is initializing now…

now that it will be formatted etc… can it be plugged into ANY laptop?[/quote]

Well, because it is formatted as NTFS, it will not work on computers with Windows 95, 98 or ME. However, these days most computers will have Windows 2000 or XP anyway.

Oh, and it won’t work on a computer with Mac OS or Linux either, but I don’t think this will affect you.

So in other words, it should work on any computer with Windows 2000 or XP.

Well done, btw. :smiley:

If you’re worried about NTFS compatibilty, you can always format [in XP] to FAT32 as long as you keep the partitions under 30 Gigs… If you need larger than 30G FAT32 partitions (or other types of formats), use Partition Magic.

Actually, you can get NTFS to work with Linux. Most new distros now have read-only support for NTFS. If you want read/write support, this is currently the best way to do it:

wiki.linux-ntfs.org/doku.php?id=ntfsmount

There is also an older project called “Captive” but I don’t think it’s being maintained now:

linux.softpedia.com/get/System/F … 1449.shtml