Problems with win 2003 recognising external drives 3

[AndyH1]

Iv'e just installed win 2003 server on my laptop (I'm a web developer before you ask why I want it on a laptop) and it all seems to install ok except for two problems

1) I have a external freecom hard drive (500GB). When I attach it the system recognises it and said found freecom drive and installed a samsung HD501JD USB device driver. Whenever I attach it to the usb it powers it up and it appears in the safely remove hardware icon section. However it doesn't appear as a drive under My Computer and even if I go into command promt and do e: f: etc theres no drive seen. My other machine running win xp has the same driver but shows the drive no problem.

2) My laptop is a HP Pavilion dv2815ea Entertainment Notebook has a NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS graphcs card. I tried installing the drivers sent by the manufacture which are for win XP. First time I did an install by a fluke these ran fine, but I did a clean reinstall of win 2003 because of other problems and when I tried installing them again it said they were not compatible with my system (even when I ran them in win XP compatable mode) and won't let me install. Using the inf file in the update display driver meant they loaded ok, but caused a crash when I boot up. Yet on the previous install it all seemed to work fine.

Can anyone advise graphics drivers for the laptop and how to install them. Its not too much of a prob as the standard vga driver works ok, but would be nice if I could get them working

Can anyone help - particularly with the external drive problem

Thanks in advance
Andy

 

[TheLad]

1) Go into Disk Management and see if the disk can be seen. You probably only need to allocate it a drive letter.

2) Have you downloaded the latest XP drivers and tried them?

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"Insert funny comment in here!"
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[AndyH1]

I tried Disk Management, but its not showing there. Its an external drive which connects via usb port.

ie

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Freecom-500...1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1232128634&sr=8-1

Thanks
Andy

PS have sorted the NDVIA problem so its just this driv problem bugging me.

 

[itsp1965]

1. In regards to your disk.. besides what The Lad had indicated, check to see if it isn't a GPT formatted volume as opposed to standard NTFS. My son had a 500GB LaCie drive that couldn't be read by his XP home machine and I had to reformat it

2. Have you checked the laptop website to find out if your display drivers are indeed compatible with Windows 2003?

 

[unclerico]

1) I've seen this when the drive is basically hardcoded to use a drive letter on the host. I've had to change drive letters of my DVD drive to get it to appear. I've also seen issues when multiple USB drives are connected where I'll need to change the drive letter of the device that was connected first.
2) They've pretty much covered it.

I hate all Uppercase... I don't want my groups to seem angry at me all the time! =)
- ColdFlame (vbscript forum)

 

[AndyH1]

One thing I forgot to mention is I can insert a normal usb stick in the same port and that appears ok. The drive is formatted to NTFS. My other machine which is Win XP sees the drive fine, so I'm a bit stumped. Thanks for the advice though
Andy

 

[unclerico]

That very well could be. Just for fun, connect your USB drive and change the drive letter of your DVD drive. Not all USB devices act the same way ;-)

I hate all Uppercase... I don't want my groups to seem angry at me all the time! =)
- ColdFlame (vbscript forum)

 

[AndyH1]

TheLad was right! For some reason the drive appeared is disk management this time and I assigned it the letter E: then it appeared

Many thanks to you all
Andy