External hard drive not recognised.

**wheeloftime** · 02-16-2007, 07:36 PM

I have caddy that uses a laptop hard drive and connects via USB. Has worked fine for about a year but the hard drive packed up. Have just bought a new hard drive and fitted it in the caddy. When I plug it into the USB the little message at the bottem left hand side says 'new hardware detected' then another message comes up saying mass storage device etc with the make of the drive (Fujitsu) then another message appears saying something like hardware installed and ready to use. Trouble is it doesn't appear in 'my computer', if I choose a file and choose 'save as' and then try to navigate to the drive it doesn't appear in the list. However if I click the USB remove icon at the bottem left it does appear there, although it does not have a drive letter assigned to it. Have tried it on four different computers and I have the same problem on every one of them. Anyone got any ideas?

**Virtualbody1234** · 02-16-2007, 07:58 PM

The drive needs to have a partition created and then formatted.

This can be done with: Right click on 'My Computer'>Manage>Disk Management.

**wheeloftime** · 02-16-2007, 10:31 PM

Thanks for the help. Did what you said and it works fine now.

**Virtualbody1234** · 02-16-2007, 11:03 PM

You're welcome.

I should also point out that your description of the problem was very clear and precise. It makes it a pleasure to help when done like that.