I have a Dell 600m (two year old) and now that I am doing lots of video capture, I have less than two gigs left on its puny 30 gig drive. I want an excellent rugged performing hard drive that will work great with this for demanding video purpose. I use the most memory intensive settings because I am a videophile. I want to spend under $500 bucks. I still owe $900 on this at my 29.99% interest rate and don't wanted to ditch this otherwise acceptable notebook.
I installed an a 2.5 Toshiba notebook drive in a external enclosure and I can't get XP to recognize it. The drive spins up and the light comes on to indicate it is running but nothing is shown in device manager or My computer. It also is not shown in disk management.I have uninstalled the the USB drivers through the device manager with no change after rebooting. The USB ports work fine with my other external drive.The drive was working fine in a notebook that had a cracked screen. It is formated in NTFS. What else should I be looking at to solve this problem?
So after attempting and repair-install (xp pro sp2) I ended up having to RE-install and was able to recover ALL of my data (this was largely thanks to the helpful people here, and their friendly advice) but that's also kind of the problem too. I now have a dozen versions of Owner, Guest, etc. My programs and downloads are all over the place and are missing pieces necessary for functioning. Thousands of empty files (that I'm reticent to delete because of their possible value/necessity) and paths that lead to nowhere.What I want to know is: Is there a way to consolidate/trim down the registry (this is the area that I'm least familiar with), to eliminate some of these loose/dead-ends & file paths? Also, I am the ONLY user on this machine. What (if anything) can be done to trim away some/any of the fat? For you see, I have gigs of it.
I have 2 laptop hard drive both (20 gb) one is Hitachi and othe one is IBM . I did connected to the IDE of my Desktop computer and the first one is recognize (Hitachi) but other one (IBM) doesn't recognize .when it was connected I did open the cover and the disk is runing . please inform me with any idea and I am not sure when i did open it if everything is right place . if there is some website of the Notebook hard drive which is shows tutorial or with good pictures then i see everything is right place .
After working for sometime with Maxtor One Touch II external drive, I have experienced the following problem: If the computer is left for some period of inactivity, for 1-2 or more hours (the light on the drive is on and not blinking) I cannot access the drive and the OS message is "One touch is not responding". The only remedy is to restart the computer. My System consists of: WindowsXP SP2 and 512 MB Ram The Maxtor OneTouch II drive is connected via a firewire inlet of the computer, the file system being NTFS. The drive is partitioned unto 2 logical drives (~150 GB each)
I have Dell XPS w 2 hard drives. the master is 80gb(NTFS).."C" drive, and the slave is 120gb(FAT32)...."F" drivethe other day, after a re-start, Windows gave me the not so friendly message "Checking file system on F...the volume is dirty...windows is verifying files and folders.......0 percent complete"now, the problem is that it took 30 HOURS! before it completed its checkup! well, so before i panicked too much, i decided to buy an external drive to back up some stuff from the slave drive. after backing up about 20 gb worth of stuff, i re-started, and it did the same thing! tho this time it took "only" 18 HOURS to do its checking! it did say that "windows replaced bad clusters in files"
i connected my external HDD to my system i copied some data but now i'm not able to open that drive i have partitioned the 160GB drive to 8 20GB drives bcoz i have very important data in that drive
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.
My sis has one of those Wally-Mart Acer mini laptops; NO CD-ROM drive in it (PS: way-bad idea! Never buy a computer w/o a dvd/cd drive in it!). She managed to delete the graphics card driver and so when that occurred and rebooted, nothing on-screen! Its there, you just cannot see anything in windows! And, because there is no drive, the CD with all the original programs cannot be run in start-up mode without an external CD-ROM drive
I want to use my (HP Pavilion zv6000 w/XP) laptop as that external drive to re-load her original CD, which (of course) has all the drives on it! At start-up, the Acer (also w/XP) has an option to start-up from an ext. drive, so it has that capability (obviously, w/o a drive of its own), but how to make my HP "look" like an external drive (via USB-to-USB hookup) is the problem!
If you get another hard drive cause yours is almost full and there fore messing with the virtual.memory. If you get an external harddrive is it better to move the pagefile to the new hard drive which is what I was going to do change the drive for the virtual memory, then I got thinking, in case you didn't use the external drive all the time hooked up for whatever reason they you wouldn't have a pagefile on the old one does that make sense? I thought maybe it would be better just to move a bunch of pics and music to the extenal drive and leave the virtual memory (pagefile) where it is on the old drive, or would it make any difference??
i have WD elements 160gb external drive, when i connect it to my desktop it say new hardware found and asks to install software for it but when i ask XP to install software automatically then it says no driver found. the drive is plug and play so i don't have any software for it nor it is listed anywhere in the WD website. However the drives is functioning properly in my laptop and on my freind's desktop as well....so seems like my drive's alrite.I can easily use 4gb pen drive and 30gb ipod on my desktop but not my external drive.
I have an LG external DVD burner. When I put DVD's into the drive and then place a movie on the disc the computer will not reconize the DVD disc and will not burn it.Am I missing a driver for XP? I have never had a DVD burner on my computer. Or is there software that goes with the optic drive.
I am running XP sp1 Recently windows wants to run a checkdisk on my external USB drive. This is done every time I start windows.Even though the checkdisk result shows no errors it wants do do it every time on boot up.I did a manual checkdisk ( full check) and it seemed to clear it up for a couple of days but now it had returned to the same situation.The disk is fairly new so I do not think there are any problems with it and it runs fine.
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).
I purchased a us modular flash drive from tiger direct. I'm running xp home edition. I'm on cable and a friend of mine is on dial up, but he's also using windows xp home. His computer is only about 2 yrs old. Anyway, he ask me if I'd copy the free programs ad-aware and spybot, since it takes him so long to download anything, which I did. I gave him the drive, but when he tried to access it, he said it gave him an I/O error. His computer wouldn't read it. I brought it home and plugged it in and it works fine on my machine. On his he said it'd show up as a drive (H:), but when he tried to open it, it gave the error. You don't have to install any drivers (at least you didn't on mine. It came with no cd. Will this drive only work on my machine or what.
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 wanted to do a fresh reinstall of windows XP on my laptop and had a few questions.I received a windows XP service pack 2 reinstall disk from dell just a few days ago since they never gave me it when first purchased the laptop.I also have to say is that my DVD Drive on my laptop doesn�t work but I have an external CD-Rom that that I will be using for the reinstall. So here are a couple of my questions.Will my laptop have any trouble using the external drive? Will all my data be erased when I do a reinstall? Do I need to reinstall drivers?
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?
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.
I need to learn more about backups. Bottom line is what do I do right now to make sure what I need is saved, because there's some indications that my hardware may be failing. But I want to do it right from the git-go so I don't waste a lot of time redoing things.
A) I have read the 1/26/06 thread started by cway's question--["Originally Posted by cway I am a 'Novice' to Backups, but am trying to learn..."]. It all seems to make sense to me.
B) Now I want to use what Stallcup (in that post) suggests as the 3rd option--["3) You want to avoid having to reinstall WinXP and have the quick, less labor intensive way of frequently backing up programs files and data." namely "frequently clone the system HDD to the backup HDD. In this way, if the system HDD gets corrupted, I can clone the backup HDD back to the system HDD"]
C) I have MAJOR concerns about what Bob Cerelli mentions about having outdated datafiles backed up--["...data has changed since the image was made, you will have old data restored. But a lot depends on how the computer is orgainized. For example, if just the OS and programs are on one partition which is imaged, and data on another, then restoring that first partition it will not affect data."] I have ADD-like memory problems about when I back up what, and I can't afford to overwrite new data with old...
Soooooo... I'm planning to buy a 200gb external hard drive. Then what?
1) what software do you recommend? a) Should I use the HP software that came with my computer? or buy something? b) Ghost? is that Symantec? (Can someone say more about the concerns with using that software?) c) Does "ghosting" mean the same thing as "cloning" (in Stallcup's post--#2 above)?
2) how do I know if all my OS and programs are on one partition? (I have an HP and the hard drive is obviously partitioned into "HP_Pavilion (C)" and "HP_Recovery (D)".
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?
After backing up on this drive for nine months (and with a reformating three months ago), now the backup will not recognize the E: drive. No error message is given. MY Computer shows that it is now 3/4 full with plenty of space (46 gig) on the Acomodate 160 gig drive under NTSF format. I am thinking of changing to a fire wire from the USB.I have been doing a complete system backup and maybe I'll change to just backing up my documents after we get it working.
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 am running XP Media Edition on a BRAND NEW Computer I hooked up today. I took an existing NTFS External Hard drive and plugged it into a vacant USB port. The new PC does not like this external drive. When I boot the light on the front of the drive turns amber and when I go to My Computer it does not appear. If I power down the drive it will finally appear in My Computer but when I try to access it there is only one EMPTY folder. When I look at Properties it says there is 160G being used and the rest is free so the data is there. I can plug this same External drive into another PC and it reads just fine.
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.