[Drumbum667]

I have a laptop HD that I bought a case for and I put it in and plugged it in. Vista said it installed fine but I cant find the drive, it's not in My Computer or in Disk Management. Please help.

[Advertisements]

You sure it's not listed on the bottom half of disk management and just doesn't have a partition created on it yet? Not having a partition on the drive would make it not show up on the top half of Disk Management.

[Fenor]

You sure it's not listed on the bottom half of disk management and just doesn't have a partition created on it yet? Not having a partition on the drive would make it not show up on the top half of Disk Management.

[Drumbum667]

Well it has Win XP installed on it so it should be partitioned. And no it's not on the bottom half.

[Fenor]

If you're plugging it into a port on the front of the computer, try plugging it into one on the back. Also, a screenshot of the entire Disk Management screen would be helpful too.

[Drumbum667]

Okay, I plugged it into a back port and still no luck. Here's the screenshot. Usually there's a WD My Book in Disk Management but I had to unplug that to plug the other one into the back.

Edited by Drumbum667, 25 May 2008 - 09:07 AM.

[Drumbum667]

I tihnk the problem lies within the HD and not the OS. I would think that XP would recognize but it didnt. Im not sure what else I can do.

[Fenor]

That could very well be. Try plugging it into another computer and see if it installs correctly.

[Drumbum667]

I plugged it into my bros laptop, which is XP, and it said there was a problem installing your hardware.

[Fenor]

Then either the hard drive is bad or the enclosure is bad. Can't really test it unless you have another enclosure and/or another hard drive.

[Drumbum667]

It could be the HD. The whole reason it's not in my laptop is because it randomly jsut wouldn't boot Windows. Even though nothing was wrong. I think it just died. Doesn't really matter. Thanks for helping me out anyway.

[Fenor]

You could always get the utility from the hard drive manufacturer and perform a low-level format of the drive. Of course you would have to put the drive back in your laptop and then boot from a CD that has the utility on it. You could also burn an image of the Ultimate Boot CD and boot from that. It has a myriad of formatting tools and other utilities that could help. A low-level format can take hours to finish depending on the size of the hard drive. Worth a shot anyways.