External Hard Drive Problem.

Hi all, my friend is having a problem with an external hard drive that he bought recently.
It connects using a USB port. We plug it in the computer and all that fun stuff. When we look under the My Computer it shows up with a CD-ROM drive icon (don't know if that's normal). If we try to double click on it we get an error message (I forget what it says and I can't check right now since I'm at work).

Some more information:
It's an AcomData HybridDrive. We're using Windows XP Home Edition.
There are no drivers for it, seems like it should just be plug and go:

I'll provide my information (the exact error message) when I get home later today. If anyone has any idea or if I just forgot to do something please let me know.

 

have you formatted the hard drive? Look here under formatting a secondary hard drive.

 

check it on other PCs, not just one. if they work fine in others then it is your mates PC

also check device manager when it is connected and see where the drive is showing up (should show up with the other hard drives), once you find it, you could uninstall it and see if when reinstalling the device, the problem fixes itself

but yeah make sure its formatted cuz if it is then maybe the drive is corrupted?

 

Ah formatting instruction. That seems like the perfect thing to do!
I'll try that out and let you know. Thanks for that.

By the way SideSwipe, I did try it on my notebook and it gave me the same error. So that doesn't seem to be the problem.

Thanks for the help so far.

 

Nope.
It shows up as a CD-ROM drive. I can't format it using those steps (guess because the computer thinks it's a CD-ROM).
If I try to open it from my Computer it tells me it's corrupt.
If I go under device manager, I see it both under Hard Drives and under CD-ROMs... I uninstall it from the CD-ROM list but I can't seem to do anything else with it after that.

The exact error is:
"Windows cannot read from this disk. The disk might be corrupted, or it could be using a format that is not compatible with Windows."
But I can't seem to be able to format it using those instructions.

 

Due to the fact that it's identified as a CD drive, I don't know if this will work, but you should see if you can find it under Disk Manager. You can format it from there if it does show up. If it doesn't, then I'm not sure what you could do other than attempt to access it from a Linux live CD. It may be some funky driver mixup, which I doubt would carry over to Linux.

 

It does show up in disk management but I can't seem to be able to format it.

 

I would try the Linux live CD route and use Gparted to try to format it, at least into something like FAT32, or something else readable by Windows. I don't know what support Gparted has for NTFS formatting.

 

Sorry for the dumb question, but when you say Gparted Linux live CD, do you mean this?

 

hmm try one of those bootable partition managers, it boots up and if from there it still shows up as a CD and not a hard disk then perhaps it really is the drive itself?

also what about in the BIOS, does it recognize it there?

and yeah you could try a windows vista CD or windows XP, maybe theyll detect the drive and you can partition and format from there

oh and why do they call it a hybriddrive?

 

I have no idea why it's called that. It might be a problem with the drive (since I have no idea why it would show up as a CD-ROM drive isntead of a HDD).

I'll do all those things when I get home later and hopefuly something works.

 

That should work just fine. I had originally been referring to an Ubuntu (or similar) live CD that will allow you to boot into a Linux desktop from the CD. From that desktop you can access Gparted and attempt to format the drive. You will probably have to make sure that the drive is unmounted to use Gparted on it. That just means that there will normally be an shortcut on the desktop for that drive if it is mounted; right click it, select "eject" or "unmount" or something similar, then use Gparted.

However, in retrospect, the first thing I would try to do is download the drivers for the specific HDD it is off of this page. Try that under Windows, you might not have to reformat anything. In fact, I'm sort of skeptical that even if you managed to reformat it that it would appear as an external HDD under windows, it seems to be a lower-level issue than that.

 

I just can't get the thing to work.
I just gave it back to my friend and told him I couldn't get it working. There might be something wrong with it so he's just going to return it.
Thanks for the help everyone.

 

Did you guys buy the drive ready to go or did you add the drive to the enclosure?

Some of these cases you can configure for a drive OR a CD drive. Check your interface settings on the drive.

 

Did you read the manual?

Quote from page 42:

It looks like this is by design as part of the software package and built-in security.

John

 

Bought ready to go.

Thanks for that. We didn't have an instruction manual (it was already opened when he bought it - I don't know why but he got it for very cheap for that reason).

So it's normal for ther CD partition to show up. That's good.
Then according to the manual, it says:

But it doesn't.

I'll try the troubleshooting things when I get home and see if that works.

 

Still nothing.
Under Computer Management, it shows up as a CD Rom and I can't delete partitions or format the thing. I can't get it to show up as a HDD under my My Computer (there should be the CD-ROM icon AND the HDD). The pop-up greeting window or the task bar menu don't show up either. It's as if the program itself (located on the CD-ROM part of the hybriddrive) isn't working.