Need help installing a SATA external drive

Seems like the most appropriate place - Ok, here is the deal.

I purchased an external case for a backup drive and purchased the new drive, purposely a SATA drive for use in a future tower.

My current computer is all IDE so I cannot simply install the drive in the tower to then setup the partition, etc.

What are the tricks to doing it thru the USB hookup?

The computer doesn't recognize a mass storage device because it is obviously not partitioned yet but it does recognize the 'case' connection.

running WinXPsp2

thanks,
dan

Right Click on My computer, Select Manage, Go to Disk Management, click drive and make your partitions.

You might need to initialize it first using Zepher's method.

Zepher wrote in post #3439465
Right Click on My computer, Select Manage, Go to Disk Management, click drive and make your partitions.

Its not showing up there.

I did manage to get it to say 'unknown device' so I am making progress LOL

any other tricks?

Tsmith wrote in post #3439533
You might need to initialize it first using Zepher's method.

Do you have this option?

strange. It should load the USB mass Storage driver and then you should see it in Disk Management. And ya, you will need to probably initialize the drive, forgot about that step, thanks Tsmith.

Well I finally got Disk Management to recognize the drive. But when I initialize it it runs for abut 2min then says "Unexpected error" then lists the drive as 'Basic - Unreadable'

NOT a computer GURU but does it need to be formatted? Hopefully someone with more knowledge can chime in here.

What size of PSU do you have and what else do you have running off it?

If all else fails you could always get a PCI card with SATA connections and hook it up inside your tower to format and then switch it to the external case.

In2Photos wrote in post #3441769
If all else fails you could always get a PCI card with SATA connections and hook it up inside your tower to format and then switch it to the external case.

I think there might be a problem with the external case.

It took a while for the computer to recognize the specific case (it had already recognized the USB Mass Storage device) and in the moment (of course) that I unplugged it, it began to recognize the "eSATA blah blah blah".

So I plugged it back but I was too late. It gave me the error message "unable to recognize drive" or something like that.

Well I plugged it in again and FINALLY the Logical Disk Manager recognized the drive but every time I try to initialize it, it crashes.

I never got the little popup again about "eSATA ... ". I did try uninstalling the USB driver and stuff and I also I tried it on my laptop as well

Should I return the drive and/or the case?

I was going to stick it in a work computer which has SATA internals and do it that way then back into the external case.

But I'm tempted just to go back to Tiger Direct without touching anything, exchange it all, and start over just in case

Sounds like either the case or the drive is sketchy..
I'd do exactly that and dump it all.

There should be a jumper on the back of your SATA drive. It is there to throttle the SATA drive to 1.5GB/s. Perhaps it is set to 3GB/s and your enclosure does not support this configuration?

Download the initialization software from the manufacturer. It will recognize, initialize, and format the drive. It's usually called (MFGXXX) Disk Utility or whatever.

That's the way I've always done it at least - like... 75 times.

Ok, well I exchanged both items.

Its formatting now. This time Disk Management gave me a popup for initializing the drive.

Don't know if it was the case or the drive LOL

_