Hello eragirb,

I have formed an opinion about your position with respect to conditions and circumstances through careful weighing of your evidence given and testing of premises, that being my own mental image of what may or may not be going on here. Consequently, this all may be of slight degree in quality or aspect having great worth or significance particularly on what I believe to equal in meaning... roughly put: I believe you have a HDD USB kit. A fascinating little item indeed. Quite. It is also fortunate for that identical one that is you that I am quite fluent in the English language and am more than gladdened to make an effort to do, accomplish, solve, or in effect "tie off" the loose ends for this particular dilemma. Please note the lack of "technical" IT type words tha can disturb in mind or purpose (a.k.a. throw off) one not so technically inclined or as you put: not a computer expert. But really, who IS a computer expert? It is hard to say. With that being said, you should try to arrange this apparatus as judicious or restrictive in choice to cable only, rather than master. A good step to try. Perhaps you have another computer available that you could also attempt to connect your external HDD (or kit) to. This is to eliminate your PC as being the problem. I hope ome of this may help. Good luck my friend! talustheelder@hotmail.com.

Talus.

Hi,

Unless you have already done so you probably need to partition and format the drive. Please advise what operating system you are using so we can give you brief and clear instructions on how to do this.

I suspect you are using Winsows XP. In which case you need to go into help and search for disk management or computer management. Both of these will produce links that will take you to the section where you can partition and format hard disks

Also try this link

http://www.theeldergeek.com/hard_drives.htm

hth

Ceri

I had a similar problem. I had a few extra HD's laying around and was wanting to connect a removable storage device to my system to store sensitive data. I purchases an ADS external USB 2.0 case. After installing a drive, I noticed that the system recognized a new USB device, which I believe at this point my system was only talking to the USB stuff in the drive case (irrespective on the drive within). Following the instructions provided from ADS, the system didn't recognize the drive nor provide me a new drive letter. What it boiled down to was reformatting/ partitioning the FAT drive to NTFS (which I choose over FAT) creating new disk/ partition info. Afterwards it works just fine. BTW: I had to use the format utility supplied from ADS, then I could use window's format anytime I wanted.

Mike.