iPAQ214 won't recognise a USB drive

[MichaelHooker]

I have the special cable from HP which permits USB pen-drives and some other USB equipment to be attached to the PDA. They show up as "Hard Disk" in File Explorer.

Does anyone have any idea, please, why just one of my six Sandisk Cruzer pen-drives does not show up? The drive works fine on my laptops and desktop, it's formatted the same as the others, the only difference is the size - it's the biggest at 16 GB. The light comes on when it is plugged in to the cable.

The iPAQ uses Win Mobile 6 classic, if that's any help.

Thanks

Mike

 

[kjv1611]

My initial guess is that your handheld cannot put out enough juice(electricity) for that device. Desktops and laptops sometimes don't supply enough electricity over some USB ports, so it's entirely possible that'd be the case with a handheld, I would think.

One reason I would think this is possible, is you say it's only the case with the largest of the bunch. So, it may require just a tiny bit more energy to read from the full disk.

Another possibility is that I believe your handheld has USB 1.1, not USB 2.0. It's possible that for some reason, the thumb drive in question doesn't work properly enough with USB 1.1... and then again, that could be another piece with the electricity issue.

Those are just guesses at this point, but they seem highly logical for your predicament.

--

"If to err is human, then I must be some kind of human!" -Me

 

[MichaelHooker]

Thanks. I can test the power issue by trying a powered USB hub (when I've found the power supply for the hub I have - I don't usually need it, so it's buried in a drawer with countless other anonymous black boxes. I'm sure they breed.) I should have thought, however, that the light would not come on at the normal brightness if there were not enough milliAmps (current) (electricity) (juice) available at the port

No idea what flavour of USB the iPAQ is, but it works great with a 1 Terabyte USB hard disk (which of course, comes with its own power supply). This drive is where all my photos end up. I have tried the USB pen drive on an old but faithful Win98 Gateway laptop and it works fine, so it looks like the drive will talk to USB1.1 - and we all know how finicky Win98 is about USB.

This episode has made me rethink my project which was to use the iPAQ to transfer files from camera CF cards to the USB pen drive when away from home for a couple of weeks, thus freeing up the camera cards for further use. Looking at the price for another 16 GB USB drive in case I needed to replace the one I have, I came across 16 GB SDHC cards. The iPAQ takes SDHC cards too. I can transfer my CF data to an SDHC card instead, and won't need the cable. Much better, I prefer to travel light. Amazing how I got most of the way through a BASIC4PPC program to perform the job before realising the obvious!

But I'd still like to be able to use the 16 GB USB drive with the iPAQ so I'm still looking for the solution.

Many thanks

Mike