USB hard drive not seen by Win ME 1

[hexkev]

Hi, I've just spent a day rebuilding the system on a friend's laptop. After lots of problems with drivers that I managed to solve, mainly by chance, I was finally beaten by a stupid problem. He had a USB hard drive with all his backups on. It worked fine on his system before I touched it. When I had reinstalled Windows it refused to find the drive. To be more precise, it would see it (if you open the icon in the system tray) but it wouldn't appear as a drive letter. No amount of uninstalling the USB driver and letting it find it again makes the slightest bit of difference. I tried connecting it to my laptop (also with Win ME) and it did the same: windows could see it but it didn't appear as a drive letter.

As you can probably tell, I'm not an expert at this stuff and would really appreciate some help. I sure its something simple but I've run out of ideas. Its a bit embarrasing having to leave him without access to his stored data!

Thanks for any help

Kev

 

[micker377]

Do you have any info on the hard drive? Size - filetype (Fat32 or NTFS) - any overlay (makes large hard drive usable, or "Go-Back)? Is the drive seen in device manager?

 

[hexkev]

Hi, thanks for the response

I haven't got all the details with me, but it was a hitachi 40GB drive in a q-tec USB v2.0 (p/n 13280) external drive bay.

I had a disc with drivers but the manual said it wasn't needed for ME. I also located a Patch file on the net but the readme file that came with it left me confused. It seemed to be saying something about converting USB2 to USB1.1. whereas the website seemed to imply it was the latest driver, and it mentioned ME too. Anyway, it still didn't work.

Device Manager saw it as a generic USB Mass Storage device but it had the green question mark on the icon. It also seemed to come up as mass storage in a separate category(I think, memory a bit blurred after so many attempts to get it going)with a icon that looked like a grey rectangle.

I should also mention that when I first installed Windows, I plugged in all the USB devices at the same time (via a USB hub) and it tried to install drivers for each device (CDwriter, Printer, MIDI box). I feel this might have caused the problem. I then tried to uninstall them all and start from scratch with just the hard drive plugged directly in, but to no avail.

I found a few suggestions here and there last night: Looking at device manager in safe mode for phantom drivers; checking the IRQ's aren't clashing; checking drive doesn't have the same drive letter mapped as another one; manually installing the standard windows USB drivers.

The weirdest thing is that it was working quite happily before I reinstalled windows, and that was through the hub with all the other devices attached. Also, my friend (a complete non-techie) installed it himself but he can't remember how he got it working. He said he just fiddled around with it and eventually it came up! Aargh!

 

[cdogg]

OK, it definitely sounds like a driver issue at this point (regardless of what the manual might say). Go here:

http://www.qtec.info/service/support/drivers.htm?artnr=13280

There are two links for Windows ME. Download and install the 13278_01.exe file first, then go back and do the same for the patch which is 13278_02.exe. From your last post, it sounds like you only did the patch.

~cdogg
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884

 

[hexkev]

Thanks cdogg. I had made that mistake, you're right! I returned to my friend's computer full of hope, but unfortunately, I still couldn't get it going. I tried everything I mentioned but to no avail. I have taken the disc home to try and get it working on my laptop which is similar to his.

Thanks for your reply

 

[hexkev]

Hi, just telling the happy end to this story, and maybe help someone else out who may be in the same boat:

I managed to get the disk working by going into device manager and looking at the disk drive properties. In there it was not seeing the drive as a removable drive. So I selected the removable drive option and was then able to assign a drive letter to the drive. One last reboot and hey presto, the drive appeared in My Computer. Easy when you know how!!

 

[cdogg]

Awesome! Thanks for the follow-up and fix. Star for you...

~cdogg
[tab][navy]For general rules and guidelines to get better answers, click here:[/navy] faq219-2884