External hard disk problem

Posted by: Bosh on 04 September 2007

Got a 320Gb Western Digital external hard drive to store my scanned negatives etc which worked perfectly via a direct USB input into my PC but it wasnt large enough so I got a 500Gb Western Digital one

With the 500Gb one however, the PC will not boot up with it connected. Once booted an error reading asks me to connect it to a USB2 connection and it only work at USB1 which is a real pain with 70mb negative scans

I have tried uninstalling and re-installing to no avail. The 500mb works fine with my laptop and the USB socket works OK with my card readers and pen drives

Any ideas or suggestions?
Posted on: 04 September 2007 by fatcat
Bosh

Maybe your operating system doesn’t recognise such a large hard drive. I remember W95 could only use about 16Gb of a 40Gb drive.

If this is the case you could try splitting the drive into two by reformatting it. Although I don’t know if this is possible with an external drive.

Or/And check you have the latest service pack for the operating system.

Or Maybe the bios wont work with a 500Gb drive
Posted on: 04 September 2007 by Bosh
I'm using XP home service pack 2 with the last full update last week
Posted on: 04 September 2007 by Macker
It will more likely than not be the software implementation of the external USB enclosure that is the problem...I assume you installed any software driver it came with ? check the providers website for any updates that may have become nessesary after they produced the one you have.
Posted on: 05 September 2007 by nap-ster
FAT32 has a maximum partition size of 32Gb. Bigger than this you will have to format the disk using NTFS.
Posted on: 05 September 2007 by Cheese
quote:
Originally posted by nap-ster:
FAT32 has a maximum partition size of 32Gb. Bigger than this you will have to format the disk using NTFS.
Napster is right, do this. But it won't solve your boot problem.

To this end, go into the BIOS and disable the 'USB legacy'. Your machine will boot instantly even with your hard drive attached to it. The USB legacy actually enables you to boot on an external hard drive. As a result, your OS takes ages exploring your external HD in order to find some bootable files which obviously aren't there.

The drawback of this is that a USB keyboard might no longer work. Try it out and buy a PS2 keyboard if all else fails.
Posted on: 05 September 2007 by Cheese
quote:
With the 500Gb one however, the PC will not boot up with it connected. Once booted an error reading asks me to connect it to a USB2 connection and it only work at USB1 which is a real pain with 70mb negative scans
You do have XP with Service Pack 2 have you ? If not, this might be the cause of the USB1 problem, do a Windows Update. Unless your PC dates back to WWII, in which case only an additional USB2 card would help (provided its driver doesn't screw your system altogether ;-)

With XP/SP2, it is also completely unnecessary to install any software that came with the external HD, XP would recognize it by itself.
Posted on: 05 September 2007 by Cheese
quote:
With the 500Gb one however, the PC will not boot up with it connected. Once booted an error reading asks me to connect it to a USB2 connection and it only work at USB1 which is a real pain with 70mb negative scans
You do have XP with Service Pack 2 have you ? If not, this might be the cause of the USB1 problem, do a Windows Update. Unless your PC dates back to WWII, in which case only an additional USB2 card would help (provided its driver doesn't screw your system altogether ;-)

With XP/SP2, it is also completely unnecessary to install any software that came with the external HD, XP would recognize it by itself.