Connect External Hard Drive to 9300

I bought a 250 gig internal hard drive, put in an enclosure but when I plug it into a usb port, I cant see it in the disk management section.

Its a brand new hd so I know that it wont show on 'my computer' until I reformat it but the problem is I cant even see it to format it.

Hope someone can help me.

 

Did the enclosure have a driver disk with it?
If so you might need to install that driver first.
I have two external HDD; Buslink and a Powerspec branded one from Microcenter, The powerspec one does not need any drivers since Windows 2K and XP both recognize them but my buslink needs the drivers installed prior to using them on both systems.

 

Im running xp so no drivers are supposed to be needed.

 

Does it have a secondary power source?
If no power cord then maybe the 9300 does not have enough power to run the External HDD

 

secondary power is connected.

 

This is where it comes down to what I said about Laptops, and I think it still applies today. Laptop bios are different than that of Desktop bios, in the sense that laptop bios actually have a restriction on how much harddrive space is viewable by the operating system.

Reminds me when I had my Sony Vaio laptop, Sony said that my laptop at the time bio's would only allow my system to see up to 30GB.

Now I understand that this is a External drive, but it might be possible that the same applys for external, your best bet is to contact Dell, and ask them if BIOS restricts how much harddrive space is viewable on external drives.

 

I'm not sure if what you're saying is true xbandaidx. It sounds kinda like what you're talking about is the difference between a hard drive that is formatted with FAT32 vs. NTFS. FAT32 has a maximum partition size of 32GB. Anyways, you're probably aware of this and really are talking about something different, but who knows.

 

Totally different from what your saying.

When I had my Sony Vaio laptop, I wanted to upgrade the harddrive in it to something much bigger (it had 20GB HDD) and when I contacted Sony support about if its possible to put in a larger Harddrive, and they said

'yes, however you can only put in a harddrive that has a maximum harddrive space of 30GB, anymore than that will not be viewable by the system because the BIOs limits HDD space to 30GB'

so basically I could install a 40GB harddrive but only 30GB of it could be seen and the system wouldnt know that there is an extra 10GB on it. The laptop was purchased in Nov of 2001. It served a good 4 years.

I understand its a different company, however there are fewer BIOs versions out there. I think it was Phoenix Bios?

You should reword that. I had FAT32 Partitions over 32GB's

That 32GB limit only applies to Windows 2000 Pro and XP Pro.

 

Try it on another PC and see if you can get it to be recognized there. That'll at least confirm if it is working or not.
You should be able to use an external HD with no problem. I use several hooked into a hub when I dock my M170.

My first suspect is that the enclosure isn't working correctly. Check the jumpers on the HD as well.

 

People, maybe you know, what size limit does bios have in Acer 2400 notebook. Currently i have 40 GB. I know for sure, that 80/100 GB drives may be installed, but i want 160 or 200 harddrive. Is it possible? The interface is IDE/ATA.

Thank U!!