External Drive problem, please help.

[tuanklam]

Hi All,

I just got an external hard drive for storage purpose, but it's not working. When I hooked the drive to my Latitude c640 via USB port, it say my pc doesn't have a HI-SPEED USB host controller and that the drive will work at a reduce speed. So I ignore the warning and went to 'My Computer' but I don't see the external hard drive like i would if i use a thumb drive. What do i need to do to get this working? Thanks in advance for help.

[daemonOS]

Does it show in device manager? What about computer management? if it does then just select the drive and format it. Now I know it should auto detect but check that. Did you try another USB contorller? or another device in that spot?

[diablo7877]

Do you have USB 2.0 on your laptop? If you don't, then your HD might not work with USB 1. Sadly, there isn't much you can do if that is the case. Well, nothing short of buying a new laptop.

A friend of mine was having the same problem, and he actually had USB 2.0. He thought it was a problem with the laptop, so he warrantied it with Toshiba, but they were unable to fix it because the HD was unsupported by the computer, and they said it was the HD's fault... I don't see how that could be but, I guess that's how it is? Try using it on a friend's computer, and see if it works. You might have to buy a new HD to use with your laptop... Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

[tuanklam]

Thanks all for replying, I was able to get it working.
Here is what I did.

1. Since my laptop didn't have a USB 2.0 host controller, I went out and bought myself a USB 2.0 Notebook PCI card.
2. Went home and plug in the PCI card; let it self install.
3. Reboot.
4. Hook up the external hard drive via the PCI card.
5. Go to My Computer -> right click -> properties -> hardware -> device manager -> disk drives: to see if the my laptop recognize the external and it did.
6. Go to Control Panel -> Administrative tool -> computer manangement -> disk management: from here initialize, allocate, and format the external drive.
7. After format is done, go to my computer and the external hard drive appear as drive Q: (the drive which i assigned).
8. After that I was able to do everything to external drive as I would on my hard drive (C.

Hope this help someone. Thanks all for helping me.