Laptop will not recognize USB Hard Drive

[billberry12]

I have a Dell D430. I want to back up some files to a hard drive I have in an enclosure that hooks up by USB, My laptop does not see it in my computer. Ii have tried restarting and that does not help. What can I do to get it to recognize it?
Thanks, Bill

 

[whs]

Have a look in Disk Management and check whether it has a drive letter and is initialized and formatted.

 

[billberry12]

How do I do that?

 

[whs]

Start > right click on Computer in the right pane > Manage > Disk Management. Tell me what it says about your drive.

 

[billberry12]

What does all this mean?

 

[hubris]

Whats on that hard drive and where did it come from ?

 

[whs]

Well, for one they have no drive letter - so you cannot see them. Assign a drive letter to the 37GB partition. Then, what is this mini partition of 55MB, where did that come from?

 

[billberry12]

It is a hard drive I had cloned an image of another hard drive on using Acronis. Sold that computer. I went into disk managment as you see, then formatted the larger portion after the sytem assined it as D: They was some kind of conflict I had to address. I don't know what the small partition is, but it would not let me format it if I remember correctly, and I did a Windows Easy tranfer of Files and settings to the D partition. I am reinstalling Windows 7 Pro clean on this computer, and that's what I was using this USB hard drive for. Got it done correctly I think. Never have ran into this "not recgognizing problem. I guess it's a Windows 7 thing huh?

 

[whs]

It is a hard drive I had cloned an image of another hard drive on using Acronis. Sold that computer. I went into disk managment as you see, then formatted the larger portion after the sytem assined it as D: They was some kind of conflict I had to address. I don't know what the small partition is, but it would not let me format it if I remember correctly, and I did a Windows Easy tranfer of Files and settings to the D partition. I am reinstalling Windows 7 Pro clean on this computer, and that's what I was using this USB hard drive for. Got it done correctly I think. Never have ran into this "not recgognizing problem. I guess it's a Windows 7 thing huh?

I don't think we can blame it on Windows7. Something is all screwed up. I do not quite undestand the cloning part. Are you saying that you cloned a win7 image to that drive? The small partition could be an image of the a system assigned partition from where you cloned the whole thing. Then you say that you transfered files. You need to unravel that whole story because I do not see the sequence of events.

 

[billberry12]

I'll try to explain. I had used the USB hard drive as a cloned back up for another computer that I sold. I no longer need the clone. I decided to use this hard drive as an external drive to transfer my files and settings from this computer to it so I can do a clean install on this one, then put the files and settings back on here. I formatted the USB drive, then transferred my files and settings from this computer to it using Windows easy tranfer. I tranferred to the newly formatted D: partional on the USB. I do not know what the small partition is. Does this make better sense?

My original problem was that this computer would not recognize the USB hard drive initially. When I was told to go to disk management, I figured out how to assign it a letter and format it, therefore, problem is solved, unless you see something I missed.


Comments please?

 

[Frostmourne]

Delete the partition and extend the other one. First, boot Ubuntu as a live cd, and get all your data off onto another drive.

 

[billberry12]

Sorry, I have no idea what you mean by "boot Ubuntu as a live cd, and get all your data off onto another drive. "

Can you explain?

 

[Frostmourne]

Sorry, I have no idea what you mean by "boot Ubuntu as a live cd, and get all your data off onto another drive. "

Can you explain?

Ubuntu is a very solid linux OS. All you do is the get the whole OS as a 699MB image. You then burn this image to disc and then reboot with the disc in the drive. Maybe you have to modify your BIOS, maybe not, to boot from CD, but when it loads you can copy your stuff off the drive. It doesn't touch your Windows install unless you decide to install it which for this purpose is not necessary:

Download Ubuntu | Ubuntu

I can walk you through the steps.

After the .iso image, get ImgBurn:

The Official ImgBurn Website

And we'll take it from there.

 

[whs]

Very good. I now see what you have done initially. I am glad you were able to assign the drive letter. As I said, the little partition is probably a leftover of the cloning job. If it does not bother you, just leave it. Else you could use a live Ubuntu ot fedora to delete it. But since you would get the unallocated free space to the left of the big partition, there is little you could do with this space unless you restart revamping that whole drive.