I've got an external, mains powered USB hard disk caddy that XP recognizes in every way seemingly ('Hardware installed and ready to use', 'Device working properly' in hardware manager etc), but it won't friggin' show up in Control Panel or Auto Play once it's connected

I've tried it with two different IDE (PATA) HDDs (it's an IDE/SATA caddy, but I don't have a spare SATA) in two different PCs, and it never shows up

The driver disc only has '98 drivers since as far as the makers (NextG) are concerned, everything should just be tickety-boo in XP, and guess what? Their fcuking site is currently being updated...

Any advice would be greatly appreciated before said aluminium enclosure gets taught a lesson

Have you formatted the drive? If not it won't show up in My Computer until you do.

Pull up Disk Manager and format the disk, it should then appear as normal.

I'll maybe give that a go, but one of the IDEs had data on it anyway

If it's already formatted then it should show up.

Does it appear in disk manager?

Yes, and I initialized it, but it doesn't wanna know in terms of formatting it (option doesn't even appear, never mind show as greyed out)

I'll try my other caddy on my main machine tomorrow (on the netbook, and about to play PS2 games ) and let you know how that goes...

On another note, would I be able to point third party formatting software at it do you think? I'm guessing it would have the same problems?

The biggest problem is that Windows can't format the drive in Microsoft FAT32 format, if the drive is bigger than 30-50GB (can't remember the exact size off hte top of my head).

I got a drive recently for one of the directors, after spending hours failing to format it at work, I took it home and OS X formatted it in about 30 seconds!

Right, first off, my other caddy works fine. So I'm starting to think I've got a problem caddy with the other one, since one of the drives I installed in it had data on it and used to work before, but now doesn't. The second drive may need formatting which brings me to Dave's post...

What's the deal with:



Would I be able to use third party formatting software with it, do you know?

And just out of curiosity, if I install the second drive in a desktop machine and point a 'Doze disc at it for FAT32 formatting purposes (as if you were doing a new installation), would that work? I've no intention unless I got extremely desperate, but I'm just curious...

Thanks for all the help thus far chaps

Third party formatters probably will work.

Microsoft crippled the format command in XP and Vista, so that large drives (greater than 32GB) cannot be formatted. it was an attempt to push people to NTFS, which is all fine and good, but causes problems when you are using external drives (or secondary internal drives/partitions) for sharing data between operating systems.

Thanks for that, I'll maybe give it a go tomorrow.

In a NAS device, is there any benefits to FAT32 over NTFS? I have a NAS sitting here doing nothing...

NTFS is better than FAT unless you're using non-Windows devices. It supports larger files, it's faster and less prone to corruption.

Proper NTFS support has only recently been added to Linux, and it's still not 100%. Earlier versions couldn't even write to it, so if you plan on using non-Windows equipment with it you need to check carefully first.

Note; a lot of NAS devices don't support NTFS because they use Linux. They often require formatting with EXT2 or similar.

^ Thanks for that, it'll be 'Doze all the way

Can you clarify; is this a NAS or just a normal USB drive enclosure?

NAS = Network Attached Storage. They often have a USB port too, but the main job is to plug into the network and share files without needing a computer being switched on. They have a low power computer built in.

Well, I do have a couple of USB HDD caddys (what I was talking about at the start), but now what I'm talking about is a NAS (I think), one of these in fact:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000AL5H7A

Hmm, they call it the "Toaster" because it looks like one and it toasts disks.

It runs hot, and uses propitiatory software. Forget NTFS, and make sure you back up your files somewhere safer. I didn't know you could still buy these!