external hard drive

michaelcooper5 · #1 19-10-2008, 18:59

Quick question. A friend of mine loaned me his external WD Hard drive to copy some songs to my hard drive. So i connected the USB cable, vista sensed it and said installing drives. Go to Control Panel / Device options, and there it is .. But when i go to my computer in vista to see whats on the drive and try to transfer files it doesnt show up .. What am i doing wrong here? Thanks guys!

Kelainefes · #2 19-10-2008, 20:57

Was the HD connected to a Apple PC?

michaelcooper5 · #3 19-10-2008, 21:45

no, windows

affiliate13 · #4 19-10-2008, 21:59

Open disk management in the administrative tools and see if the disk is there. It may just have installed the controller and not the disk.
Is the disk an ethernet NAS type extenal box as well as USB/Firewire?

michaelcooper5 · #5 19-10-2008, 22:34

Opened disk management. My USB harddrive (external) is there. Shows that it has been partitioned but no volume letter is assigned. When i try to assign, it is greyed out and wont let me access.

godsdog · #6 19-10-2008, 23:14

You're not the only one to complain about this with WD external drives and Vista. Consensus seems to be you're stuck with it unless you fall into that category: Error message... but I'm sure you'd have got the update for it at some point.

If you want the files desperately I'd plug the drive in and boot with a linux live cd (eg, kanotix / knoppix) and copy the files over from the external to the Windows drive.

michaelcooper5 · #7 19-10-2008, 23:34

Negative. Windows installed driver perfectly. The external drive shows up in disk management fine. Shows that the drive is healty and has been partitioned correctly. The problem is it wont let me assign a volume number to the partition that I need.

michaelcooper5 · #8 20-10-2008, 17:07

any more thoughts?

godsdog · #9 20-10-2008, 18:15

The only thing I'd suggest is trying what I said in technogeeks post:

Quote:

Alternatively try going in the registry (regedit) and making sure 'DevicePath' says '%SystemRoot%\inf under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion.

Then make sure all files and folders are visible ('show hidden files and folders') and delete C:\WINDOWS\inf\infcache.1 reboot and let XP recreate it. If that doesn't work C:\WINDOWS\inf could be corrupt, in which case, repair is in order.

Basically deleting infcache.1 in Vista and letting it rebuild it. Like i said, use a linux live cd if you just want the data.

Burn a kanotix image to a disk (image is left hand side - 2007 THORHAMMER RC7.iso). Plug your external drive in. Reboot with the kanotix disk in, let it boot, choose English, get to the desktop, look on the desktop and you'll see all the drives there. Find the external drive by clicking on a drive icon (single click mounts the drive and has small green arrow symbol on the right corner of the icon) check the content in the file browser.

Do the same for the Windows NTFS drive and locate the desktop (or anything familiar to store files temporarily - move them later when you're in Fista) in the file browser. Put the two file browser windows together and highlight the files you want on the external drive and drag them to the other browser window location using left click drag - select copy and wait for completion. Exit file browsers. Log out / restart / take disk out / boot to Fista. Whizz-bang-la-la-la.