New external hard drive not showing up

stphnstevey

Just bought a new external hard drive.

Connected it to my laptop running Win XP and showed up fine.

Connected it to old desktop still running Win Me and it said the drive was not formatted and wouldn't let me write to it. It asked me if I wanted to format it and it seemed like the only way to get it to show up, so I did.

It now shows up and can write too on old desktop, but won't show on Win XP laptop or another Win 7 laptop!!

The drive is now formatted to FAT 32 - is that the problem?

Thanks

free4440273

stphnstevey wrote: »

Just bought a new external hard drive.

Connected it to my laptop running Win XP and showed up fine.

Connected it to old desktop still running Win Me and it said the drive was not formatted and wouldn't let me write to it. It asked me if I wanted to format it and it seemed like the only way to get it to show up, so I did.

It now shows up and can write too on old desktop, but won't show on Win XP laptop or another Win 7 laptop!!

The drive is now formatted to FAT 32 - is that the problem?

Thanks

unlikely , as win me, xp and 7 can all read fat 32 //

free4440273

if there is a reset button -- some of them do have -- try hitting that too/ otherwise, try reformatting to NTFS /

JasX

Its probably harder for XP / Win7 to find now if its been formatted to suit the older machine.

Things to try:

1-simplest would be to give the XP 'find/add new hardware' button a go under the XP control panel

otherwise you'd need to try adding it manually, involves:

right click on 'My Computer' (desktop or start menu)

Select 'Manage' and the 'Comuter management' window will pop up

near the bottom of the left hand panel will be 'Disk Management' click/go here

Can't remember the precise procedure from this point on but essentially you look for the new drive on the list (right click / rescan bus if needs be)

right click on it and make sure its set active, then right click and manually assign it a drive letter

sho_me_da_money

Network your systems and transfer the information across the LAN from old-to-new machine.

No point in faffing about with working out why it can't be read and one and not the other.

Have you tried formatting to NTFS as opposed to FAT/32/EX-FAT?

stphnstevey

The drive is not showing up to be formatted on my Win XP or Win 7 laptop. Win Me doesn't seem to have any options to change the file format?

Mado

I had exactly the same problem.
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/43435672#Comment_43435672
Following the step by step cleaning up/sorting of my PC sorted it.
Worth a try maybe?

stphnstevey

Ok, sorry to resurect this, but managed to format the drive to Fat32 and it now shows up on both Win XP and Win Me computers

My only problem now is that the drive hangs for about 3 mins beofre showing up on the Win Me computer - any ideas how I can prevent this?

Thanks

fwor

stphnstevey wrote: »

any ideas how I can prevent this?

How about upgrading to an OS that's not a decade old, and stopped being supported by MS five years ago?

When you say it hangs, do you mean it hangs while the PC boots up? If so, check the BIOS to make sure that booting from a USB device is not enabled.

Otherwise it's probably a low-level hardware issue which won't be easy to fix.

As has already been said, a much better solution would be to network old and new(er) PCs together, format it to NTFS and connect it to and share it from the new(er) PC.

If you have to have ME to run certain programs, it's much better to run it as a virtual machine using something like Virtualbox. That will hide NTFS from it and stop you having to use an archaic filesystem like FAT32.