External HDD problem

After purchasing a new harddrive for my HP laptop, I put my old harddrive into a 2.5" external enclosure. The documentation with the external enclosure said it was plug and play, so I connected the hard drive to the enclosure and plugged it into the computer via USB.

The windows notification popped up saying IDE to USB....found new hardware mass storage device etc.. But about 10 seconds later another bubble popped up saying there was a problem during installation and the hardware may not function properly. I've tried plugging it into other USB port but with no success. I can't seem to get the computer to recognize the device.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Are you using one USB port to provide both power and data? Some notebook / external HDD combinations need to use a 2nd USB port to provide sufficient power. I suspect the HDD isn't getting enough power to spin up and this will cause the error message you are getting.

John

 

I found out the solution after searching for quite a while on the web. I tried many different ideas, but once I set the jumper to "master" it worked smoothly. Thanks for the help

 

Thanks for reporting back. It's rare to have to set a jumper on a notebook HDD. Jumpers never get provided.

Was there a jumper already on the HDD and set to slave?

John

 

What I did was remove the little gray plastic piece to set it to master. Before it was on "CABLE SEL". Here is a pic of a Seagate drive http://images.planetamd64.com/phatsob/seagate/54003/momentus006.jpg . Mine was initially on the last jumper setting and I changed it to the first one (Master).

 

Interesting.... It's unusual to have the HDD in a notebook which isn't master. Is the replacement HDD in your notebook running fine without any jumper?

John