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Hi, guys - I hope I'm posting in the right place. I have a Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB SATA hard drive which was formatted in XP. It sits in a swappable hard disk enclosure which plugs in via USB.
It works fine on my XP machine, and I can read and write to it. Sadly, my Windows 7 machine recognizes the drive as an ATA/ATAPI bridge in the device manager, but I can't see it in the disk manager to assign it a drive letter (as advised on other posts on this forum.) It doesn't show at all. I can't seem to find any fixes - any ideas what it could be?
The drive is just fine on the XP machine, so it isn't a cable issue. Do I need to set jumpers or something? I'm tearing my hair out here - hope somebody can help. Just as I'd given up and decided to ask you guys, the internet coughed up a solution. For those interested, I got this from Microsoft Answers. Plug in and turn on the external USB hard drive.
Right mouse click on My Computer. Left click on Manage.
Left click on Device Manager. Expand the USB list. Find the USB device for your USB Hard Drive.
Right mouse click – Uninstall. Turn off the external USB hard drive. Turn on the external USB hard drive and let it find and install the driver.
Sorrow67 has outlined directly above exactly what I did to solve the problem except I'll just add that I formatted my hard drive with the following settings: 1. Default Cluster Unit Allocation size (I think it might be 512 bytes?). I looked it up and since I have files of all sorts of sizes, the best allocation size is the default one. Warning: Unit Allocation Size greater than 4kB means you won't be able to defragment. Read more at 2.
Do not enable compression for best hard drive performance. Even copying a file from one part of the drive to another, it needs to decompress, move the file and then recompress! Quick format is all that is necessary if it is a new hard drive. Regular format if you are worried about others accessing your files that were on there before, but then it is probably advisable to use hard drive scrambler/shredder software to do that.
If you already had files on it beforehand, I don't know whether you would actually need to use the Disk Manager in the first place though!