Hi... A friend gave me a new Western Digital 200 GB HDD that he thought he needed for his computer but didn't. I wanted to use it as an external drive. So I took the drive to Advanced 2000 in Alexandria and they sold me a Azio External SATA HD Kit. I do not know the difference between SATA and IDE drives but installed the new drive in the case without a hitch, plugged it in and my Windows XP announced it had found new hardware, soon found the software for it and said it was ready to go.
The drive does not show up in My Computer. So, following the instructions in the leaflet that came with the case, I went to the Device Manager and there it is -- the Western Digital drive (along with the internal drive and a second external Maxtor drive). But it does not show up in My Computer. Several other USB drives DO show up that are ports for data storage cards (Secure Digital and a couple others) for use with transferring pictures from cameras directly to the computer. The leaflet that came with the SATA case said "If the drive fails to mount after you plug it in and turn it on, you may have to partition and format it." Howevr, since I can't find it in My Computer I can't do that. There's a CD that came with the case that says it's just for Windows 98 and ME but I was tempted to try using it since in Device Manager I tried to update the driver but XP said the current driver is the best it can find. So ... I feel like I'm so close to making this work but yet so far away ... My computer is a Dell Pentium IV 3 GHz with 1 GB RAM running XP Media Center as the operating system. One more thing, the case came with a SATA port and bracket that I could install inside the computer but I'm hoping that's not necessary. I know many of you would have had this up and running in 12 minutes so I hope you can tell me what to do next. As always, thanks in advance! Gail Miller ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
