I've got Windows XP home and two external hard drives (connected via USB) and I'm trying to give one or both of those drives paging files. My hard-drives are an I-Omega 500GB and a Maxtor 300GB, both with plenty of room. I want to set my paging file to 650MB.I know how to change the size of a paging file. I go to System advanced performance...etc to get to the virtual memory box, I set the paging-file sizes for the external drives (remembering to press SET) then reboot. When the computer has restarted I run a disc analysis, but the external drives have no paging file.I notice that many people move their paging file to an external drive, so why isn't it working for me?
I have a very tired samsung X20 laptop. It has: 1.7 ghz, 2 gig ram, 250 gig western digital hard drive WD2500BEVE - with IDE type connection. Windows xp home with sp3.All has been rosey untill the connection where hard drive is placed onto the motherboard was broken. Not a problem I though as I have an enclosure to put the drive in then connect using the usb. All wired up I turned the computer on, nothing in the drive bay and the same hard drive in the enclosure connected via usb.
I have a lot of games on my c drive, i would like to move them to my external drive and be able to start from windows desktop. I am not sure how to associate the programs to start from the desktop because the games were automaticly installed into c drive
My old PC which was running XP died but I copied files to my external hard drive. They are now sitting on there as a dat file and I want to import and use these dat files in VISTA.
Running Windows XP home, well-protected from viruses and spyware with all the usual recommended programs. I have a 160G external firewire hard drive, NTFS system. Cannot access data all of a sudden, I am getting an error message, "file system corrupt and unreadable." In disk management, the drive is listed as healthy, 160G, but no NTFS listed. What could have caused this, and is there a way to retrieve the data? Are there any low-cost or freeware programs to do this, or is it inevitable to spend a "fortune?"
I am trialing drive encryption (TrueCrypt) and have created an encrypted D drive. I set my paging file to exist on the D drive so it is also encrypted and therefore safe and done the same with the temp directories.The problem is the screen goes all funny at boot time (splits into 4 sqiggly screens) and then comes up. It was unable to create the pagefile as there is not yet a d drive.
You have to use truecrypt to make the d drive by putting in the password, which makes sense since that's what keeps the data safe.The temp directories are used after the d drive becomes available but the pagefile.sys is not created or used that I can tell. This is a problem because either it means I have to keep the pagefile on the unencrypted C drive which is a security risk or I have to do without a pagefile entirely.
I have a Dell computer where one of the loading .dll files came up 'missing' one day, so it won't boot. I want to get all the photos and other docs off the hard drive. I had downloaded one version of linux and was able to see the files on the internal hard drive, but was unable to copy them to a memory stick or external hard drive. Now I've downloaded ubuntu and booted off a memory stick... this time, it's telling me that the internal hard drive has all kinds of bad sectors and won't let me access any of the files on there.
computer's running a lil bit slow and wont allow me to install my new mobile phone software as c drive memory is full, i've tried my best to move things to the d drive hard disk but its still really full.is there any safe way of transferring most of the programs and files over to the second hard drive?
I am cloning my existing hard drive in my laptop (sata) to an external hard drive (pata) in preparation for installing a new larger hard drive (sata)in the laptop. Can I, or how do I transfer the cloned data from the external (pata) to the new internal hard drive (sata)? Thanks in advance and I apoligize if this is a rudimentary question as this is my first time attempting something like this.
I've connected an external USB drive, but when I go to My Computer it shows it as a network drive. In addition, it gives it the same name as the mapped network drive that already exists there. When I change the name of the external drive there, it then changes the name of the mapped network drive, so again they both have the same name, although the drive letters are different. Any ideas how to make the external drive appear where it belongs in My Computer, under Hard Disk drives?
I turned the PC off to reboot when I though I was going into safe mode and went into regular mode instead. Now, it thinks one of my external drives is the C drive. On boot, I am getting a message that it cannot recognize find the system 32 windows config file (I'm paraphrasing).
I used the repair utility to get to the C prompt (which is pointed at the external drive) and checked the drive letters. I don't think the PC bios knows the hard drive is there.
I tried going into setup and reverting to factory installed configuration and that didn't change anything. I could not get it to recognize the hard drive.
I have a usb external hard drive. Can I install windows os on this drive and use it.I am told that windows must be installed only on main hard drive 9i.e. drive 0).
Recently, my motherboard fired, but the Hard drive was uneffected. Since i had a lot of info on the hard drive i tryed to find people who could take the info off the hard drive for me. I then had this great idea of just putting my hard drive into a "Hard Drive Enclosure Kit". Well, i did that and it worked great. But theres one problem, I can't seem to get into the Owner folder of the hard drive, for evey time i do, it brings up.
I just recently purchased a 100 Gb laptop hard drive together with an outer case and a USB cable. I just wanted to upgrade my laptop's hard disk, by first making an image of my current drive into my new one through the outer casing. The thing is when I connect it to my laptop, windows cannot detect it. Whats wrong with it? Is there anything I have to do?
My problem is that I am trying to use a 60 GB ATA / 133 Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Internal Hard Drive as an External Drive as a Slave and I am having trouble getting my bios to recognize it.The Hard Drive is hooked up in the same way as an Internal SATA DVD burner setup as an External DVD Burner that is running on Windows Office XP 2003 and it works fine. So what suggestion would you give me so that I maybe able to get the bios to recognize this drive?
Found some very useful info on here so decided to sign up and post a recent problem i encountered with an external hard drive. the hard drive has a capacity of 80GB and came from another pc. there was a 25/55 partition already on it from the old pc. i tried to delete the partition that was 25gb. now i can't find that 25gb at all. when i plug it in to the usb slot i can only see the 55gb partition it used to appear as 2 hard drives in my computer and nothing else. when i use disc management to format it i only see 55gb.
To anyone that might be able to help... I've had this external hard drive for a long time and I haven't been able to access it to store lots of music and videos on. My computer sees that it is there, but like I had said earlier, I can't use it. It won't let me see it unless I go to Device Manager. My computer is getting old on me and it's been places most labtops shouldn't have gone... Once in Purgatory, and now, it's on Hell's surface. I get the safely remove hardware icon down by my clock, but I don't want to remove it, I want to use it. I want it to show up in my drives so I can instantly see how much space I have left and what not... I went through the Troubleshooter, tried every possible way that I can think of, the ways the troubleshooter.
I have a Sony VAIO desktop running Windows XP. I purchased a Comstar 160MB External USB2 Hard-Drive and installed it. Since Windows XP is supposed to have the drivers that are necessary, no driver disk was included, and none was needed.The problem developed when my Windows XP began to give me problems later. I had to re-install Windows XP. I did that, and I downloaded all Windows XP up dates (including Service Pack 2). Now, this Windows installation does not install the external hard-drive. Windows recognizes that there is "a USB2 device," but Windows states that there are no drivers and asks me to furnish them.
I'm partitioning an external hard drive that's connected to my Win XP machine. I set an 80GB partition for XP (NTFS). When I tried to allocate the rest of the drive as a FAT32 partition (for my Win98 machines), FAT32 was not an option, until I reduced the partition size to 20 GB. I'm using XP's Disk Management. Is there a maximum limitation of FAT32 partition size?
I got a usb external hard drive 650gb where in it couldn't resist in the docs as it says it should be powered down unless in use. In this case how can i get back to the service pack.
I have a usb external enclosure which holds a 120 gig hard drive that I use for storage. I shut it off when I am done to save power, and just the other day I notice a file on it that is quite large isn't allowing me to open it any longer. It keeps saying that the 'file or folder is corrupt and unreadable'...Weird. I was just looking at the folder yesterday. Is there absolutely anything I can do to get that data back?? All the other files on that hard drive are fine. Why did it target out that file?
I'm just wondering whether this is a healthy maneuver, I have 1 hard drive in my computer, I want to install a fresh copy of XP, naturally I want a separate partition for the windows paging file so to avoid fragmentation of it (and no I don't care about lack of stop error message dumps) but I'd also like to maximize the speed of access so I thought I'd put the Paging partition at the front (outer rim) of the disk and the boot partition a gig and a half in (That's before the boot cut off), then just have a storage partition after that. I've already set up a computer this way, it seems okay and runs like a dream. But I have an inkling it actually isn't a good idea, mostly cause I've always just dumped the Boot/System partition at the start of the disk. Is this a really silly thing to do, if so why?
To silverduck441: The Paging File is Windows virtual RAM, and generally it is about 1.5 times the total RAM. Go to Contol Panel/System on the Advanced page, go to Perfomance and then Settings. Select "For best performance, do not set the initial size to less than the minimum recommended size under Total paging file size for all drives. The recommended size is equivalent to 1.5 times the amount of RAM on your system. Usually, you should leave the paging file at its recommended size, although you might increase its size if you routinely use programs that require a lot of memory". If you get this problem often, the answer may be to increase the settings in the virtual RAM settings manually and/or buy more RAM
I have a file folder that is 247 MB on XP that I'm trying to copy to my external Passport Hard drive. I've been able to copy all files to the external except this one, but every time I try it elicits an Error Copying File or Folder ie. "Cannot Copy File". What's up with that?
I'm connecting a 30GB Travelstar Hard Drive via an external USB 2.0 case to my Thinkpad T40 with Windows XP (pro). Windows immediately recognized it. However, the hard drive does not show up under Windows Explorer. I can go into Device Manager, click on Disk Drives, and it does show the new drive there (along with my main hard drive, which is a 80 GB hard drive).
I cannot figure out how to make it show up in Windows Explorer with an Drive Letter assigned to it and thus, how to actually use it.
I copied my data files to my external Maxtor hard disk before I tried to reformat my internal hard drive and reload Win XP. However during my partition, I didn't realize I still had the external drive (160GB) plugged in and it showed up at the top of the list and the original internal (80GB) below it. So, I followed the instruction mistakenly and went through the process of deleting the partition(on the external hard drive) and tried to partition it into two drives. Then I got an error message as I continue to try to format the hard drive "Your computer's startup program cannot gain access to the disk containing the partition or free free space you choose . Set up cannot install Window XP on this hard disk." I stopped, reboot and tried to go through the delete partition several times with the same error message. After several attempts, I realized that the external hard drive was still plugged in.
So I unplugged the external hard drive and reboot to go through the process of reformatting and partition the internal hard drive into C drive and E drive and loaded Win XP. Now even though I plugged in the hard.After I installed the external hard drive's software,driver and restarted the computer, I connected the external hard drive and don't see the drive in my computer. I could find it under Control Panel/System/Device Manager/Disk drives but it doesn't show up as an external hard drive under "My computer" with a drive letter. Under the disk management, I see the drive as Disk1 but it was unallocated. Did I lose all my data due to the delete of partition? Can I recover my data and drive ?
I am really annoyed cause I can't delete most of the files on my external hard drive, nor can I format it. I tried using this program that has always successfully deleted files off of my C and F drives. It seems there is no way to delete these files.
both my externals are perfectly fine....they work on my other computer. Originally when i plugged them into my laptop the Found New Hardware wizard would startup, but be unable to do anything.
I am backing up data to an external USB hard drive. What should I backup? I don't have enough room to backup my whole hard drive onto the external. I'm looking for suggestions of specific folders ie. Documents and Settings, etc. as opposed to advice like "whatever can't be downloaded or replaced easily".