Solved
external hard drive (drives) intermittent
Posted on 2006-07-02
Working on a Dell Inspiron 8200 Windows XP Home (SP2) and as many laptop users, I have limited HDD space. I have 2 (what were internal HDD) each in a BYTECC external HDD enclosure. Each HDD is a Seagate 7200 120Gb. They both work fine when hooked up to other machines. They are each partitioned in roughly half so there are really 4 disks that, when hooked up, should appear.
Since this is an older laptop, I have a DLink USB card which seems to funtion normally.
I've tried the following to try to get this to work but only end up friggin frustrated.
What is happening is that there are times when the computer is on that I power up the HDD and all 4 partitions show up as drive F, G, H, and I. Most times however, either none of the drives will show up or only 2 partitions (from 1 of the HDD) shows up. I've tried moving the master/slave jumpers to different positions on each drive but there doesn't seem to be any consistent way to make them all appear.
I've also tried powering up the laptop with both enclosures already powered up, but most of the time they still don't show up.
I've also swapped the HDD into the other external enclosures, but that does not seem to make any difference as to which drive shows up and which one does not.
I'm really stumped but figure that there must be something that I am doing which is causing this not to work correctly. Does anyone have any ideas on where I can begin to isolate and try to fix the problem so all 4 partitions show up every time?
Thanks in advance.
Tracy