Hitachi Travelstar 2.5 hard drive in a dell inspiron 1720

I just bought a Hitachi Travelstar 2.5 internal hard drive upgrade kit, and it comes with the hard drive (of course) but it also comes with an external housing to put your old hard drive in and to transfer your files from the old drive to the new one.

I don't want to transfer anything i just want to put this bad boy in the second hard drive compartment, but seeing as how I own a Dell Inspiron 1720, the good folks at Dell have yet to deliver my carrier and my adapter to actually put the hard drive into the computer, so I figured I would use it as an external drive until my parts came.

So I put the new drive into the housing and plugged it into my computer and the drivers installed automatically, and it says that everything is working properly. when I go to the "device manager" there are no triangles and it sees the hard drive on the USB connection in there, as well as when I go to "safely remove hardware screen", it too recognizes the drive and tells me what it is, and that it is "working properly";

HERE LIES THE PROBLEM!: when I go to the "my computer screen" or when I try and save something to the drive it does not appear, basically I cannot access the drive from my computer to be able to use it functionally. does any one know why this is?

my computer: Dell inspiron 1720, with windows vista premium 32 bit with service pack 1

the drive has this same exact problem when I tried to connect it to a Dell Inspiron 9300, with windows XP home and service pack 2.

FYI: the "kit" comes with a software disk but i believe that this software which is (EZ gigabit II) is just to transfer the data from one drive to the other. which is not what i want to do, so I have NOT installed the software.

here is a link to the store I bought it from and what I bought in case this will help you:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage...lstar&lp=2&type=product&cp=1&id=1197679249375

Thanks guys and any information you may have will be much appreciated!

 

Are you using two USB ports for the Apricorn external? One port may not be enough to power the drive....

 

You need to format the drive.

I had the same problem on a desktop drive I bought a few months ago. I ultimately had to find a way to boot from the drive (slipstreaming those darned SATA drivers along the way) and format it using the default XP installation formatting thing. I'm sure there are other ways too.

But yeah, format that sucker.

 

Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc

 

Thanks alot guys, and yeah it comes with a power cord too, and yeah it does the same thing when I have the power cord on it and the regular USB data transfer cable.

So if i go to Start -> Run -> diskmgmt.msc will this allow me to format it, or how do i format it if i cant see it, and thanks Commander Wolf but i am not exactly sure on how to format the drive. any help with this step would also be appreciated! again thanks for all your help!

 

Look for a drive that is labeled in "black", it would list that as an "unallocated disk", simply right click on that drive and create "New Partition(or something along those lines)". Once that's done, you can then format it, and make sure you mount the drive by assigning a drive letter.

 

PROBLEM SOLVED!!!

THANK YOU to all of you who helped solve this problem! I do really appreciate your help, the drive is up and running now and now all i have to do is wait for the DHL guy to get here with my parts so i can actually put this bad boy into the computer. THANKS again guys very helpfull!