I put a new hard drive in a USB case but it will not show up in My Computer
Hi, I bought a HDD from eBay and it came in original wrapping etc… It is a Fujitsu MHT2040AS and it has an IBM p/n 71p7503. I am running XP Home and my laptop is a Toshiba Sattelite 1400-503. I have the HDD in a USB case and my computer finds the HDD and has loaded software and the HDD shows up in my system Hardware configuration as HDD#2 and is working fine but it won’t show up in My Computer. How can I get this HDD to show up so I can use it? Please help. I am sure it will be a simple oversight by me. Driving me nuts.
My Computer cannot see your new hard drive in USB case because the hard drive is not partitioned and formatted yet. To partition and format the hard drive you’ll have to go through the following steps.
1. Connect the USB enclosure to the computer and turn on the computer.
2. Go to Control Panel – Administrative Tools – Computer Management. In the Computer Management window click on Disk Management.
3. In the Disk Management window you should see 2 hard drives. Disk 0 – that’s your primary hard drive and Disk 1 – that’s the hard drive in the USB enclosure. For the Disk1 you’ll see the HDD size inside the bar and also it should say Unalocated. It means that the new hard drive is not partitioned and formatted.
4. Right click on the unallocated space and click on new partition entry, the wizard for creating a new partition on the hard drive will appear. In most cases you should chose: Primary partition, partition size would already in there (entire drive), assign any free letter or leave it default, file system NTFS (default), check the Perform a quick format (faster) box, NEXT and FINISH. It might take some time. You’ll see that the LED on the USB enclosure (if you have any) will start flashing.
5. After it’s done, you should see that Disk1 says: New Volume, HDD size, and Healthy.
Now, if you go to My Computer you should see the second hard drive and you can use it as a regular drive.
January 2nd, 2007 at 12:02 pm
dear laptop freak .. I want to thank u sooooooo much on this blog .. I’ve had this new hard disk forever & I tried everything but it wouldn’t show up ..
well , until I read this article and it was so much helpful ..
just wanted to thank u for ur great help ..
Thanx !!
January 20th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Hi I have a tecra a4 PTA42A-01C001
Mobile Intel® Pentium® M Processor 760 (2.0GHz, 533 I have had it repaired 3 times in 2 year by authuriserd repair. the say it the hard drive all the time thr last hard drive lasted 6 weeks.
the problem is when booting to windows it start up boot to the main screen loads one or two icons on the bottom right corner then stops
the last time I had hard this disk problem it woulf only complete about 5% of the recover and the hard drive stops.
it seems to be heating a lot but the fans working what cause be causing this hard drives to die on me. I will be greateful if you cam answer this question it drive me crazy know knows the cause
thanks
January 22nd, 2007 at 8:53 pm
Tarks,
I think there is nothing wrong with the laptop itself and you’re just getting bad hard drives from Toshiba. Most likely the authorized center installs refurbished (not new) drives and they have a limited life time. I think you can get rid of this problem if you install a brand new hard drive.
January 23rd, 2007 at 1:51 am
Thanks
I have pu in a new drive seagate drive today see how we go.
tarks
February 1st, 2007 at 2:28 pm
My Toshiba Satellite A15-S127 Laptop 30gb hard drive crashed and I need to replace it. Toshiba Direct wants way too much money for the listed replacements for my model. Can I use ANY Toshiba hard drive in replacing it? Toshiba says I have to buy a model specific one that matches my A15? Is this really true or can I use any Toshiba hard drive which can be purchased elsewhere for a lot less. If I have to buy a model (A15-S127) specific Toshiba one, how do I find out what specs to look for?
Many thanks! Robert
February 3rd, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Robert,
You don’t have to buy it from Toshiba. You can buy any 30GB, 40GB, 60GB, 80GB, 100GB or 120GB UATA/100 notebook harddrive made by Toshiba, Hitachi, IBM, Fujitsu, etc… You shouldn’t have any problem.
February 4th, 2007 at 4:16 am
Hi Laptop Freakazoid! Whassup?
Can you please help me with something? I want to switch hard drives on my laptop because one is full. Is it possible to switch to one while still running your operating system from the other or not?
If not, isn’t the best way to copy everything to the empty drive and then use the old drive from start again?
Thanks for you help!
Bobby
February 4th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Bobby,
Sorry man, I cannot understand what you are asking me. Do you have two hard drives installed on your laptop or what? Give me more information please.
February 4th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Thanks for answering to me. I did go and buy a 30gb hard drive by Toshiba and put it in the Satellite laptop.
But I can’t get anything to load on it, even the original restore disk doesn’t find it.
Is there some kind of special software Toshiba puts on the hard drive for the system to recognoze it?
Some kind of “leader” software or system software? (which would not be on this new hard drive)
Many thanks!
February 6th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Robert,
That’s strange, there shouldn’t be any problem when you replace a failed 30GB hard drive with a new 30GB hard drive. Can you see the new hard drive in the BIOS? Do you get any error messages when you run the restore?
there is no special software on the old drive. When you replace a failed hard drive in this model, all you need is a new hard drive and original restore DVD/CD. You replace the drive, boot the laptop from the recovery DVD and follow the wizard. That’s it.
February 8th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Hi there laptop freak
I got a pretty old laptop but i really want to keep it cuz its more confy for me to work on the bed ( im learning PHP ), than working on the rough chair that i use for my desktop PC. Ok, heres the deal when i got it it had everything but a usb ( duuhh! ) a cd rom , but it had the floppy ( wich didnt have the connection ribbon to the mainboard ) so i got a 2.5 to 3.5 adapter i mount it on my desktop and i does not show up in my computer ( i tried the disk management thing it does not work either ) it shows up in bios , i did format it in ms – dos , after i unplugged my primary hdd and i labeled it and stuff but all the wire combinations i tried nothing worked in there, so im pretty in a rush to make it work so if you could help me i’l appreciate it a lot
My laptop model is a Zenith Z-note 425ln with 25 mhz CPU , the hdd is a 200 mb seagate, 8 mb ram of memory
My desktop configuration is : 3000mhz athlon 64 , 512 mb ram memory, Nvidia 5700 128 ram memory, and a 160 gb sata hard drive ( sometimes i wonder if the SATA hdd is not the reason because of wich i cant see my laptop hdd in my computer anyway, ) and a asus dvd-rw
I hope i gave a good description for you , and i wait for you to reply.
March 15th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
I have a harddrive that i can’t format
I can read the data from the harddrive but i can’t format or create / delete partitions
if i try to load xp I get
UNABLE_TO_MOUNT_BOOT_VOLUME
but if i run a checkdisk, there are no faults or bad clusters if i use the tool provide by hitachi i get
0×75 – Defective Device, component failure
Is it really defective ? or is there something else wrong
It an aspire laptop
March 15th, 2007 at 7:27 pm
Peter,
Probably it is.
July 29th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
I had this compaq v3011au for almost one year already. Recently it started to gave me a lot of problems. First and 2nd problem solved already but then now I had the 3rd one in 2 weeks after I got my laptop back from the service center for the faulty dvd drive. Suddenly, the laptop freeze when I was doing my work and I can’t move my mouse and forced to restart it by pressing the power button. Nothing came out after the restart, not even the compaq logo screen. When the hard disk light stopped flashes, the whole process is freeze, no matter whether is already boot into the windows or not. What is the exact problem here??
October 29th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Hi my friend gave me a toshiba satellite a15-s127 and it won’t boot up. I was wondering if there might be something simple to do to fix this or do I need new parts for it? If so would you recomend upgrading the processor, ram, and hard drive? Could you tell me what you might upgrade them too.
Thanks Jon
March 14th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
I have a 4yo Tablet laptop running on XP tablet edition.
I.m running out of storage and its slower and slower.
I just bought a WD 160GB PATA drive and intend to Ghost the drive.
I installed Acronis TrueImage 11.
I installed the HD in a USB case and connected it.
The little pop up window said the new HD is ready for use, but I cannot see it in explorer.
The light on the USB case is on.
I followed your advice above, but it does not show in Control Panel -> Comp Management -> Disk Management.
Can you help me?
Cheers, Stefano
May 8th, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Hello.
I would like to thank you for this very informative article. It helped me a lot. Again, thank you very much!
Printed this out for future reference.