Usb External Hard Drive Not Showing

#1 longnailsredhair

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Posted 07 December 2005 - 12:20 PM

I have a usb hard drive kit that I use constantly. I keep my music and zip files on it. Well, it works fine on Windows XP but my sister has Windows ME and it is detected but does not show under my computer or in Windows Explorer. Can someone tell me why? Thanks

#2 quietman7

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Posted 07 December 2005 - 03:06 PM

ME may require the device drivers to be installed before it works properly while XP does not.

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#3 longnailsredhair

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Posted 08 December 2005 - 12:10 PM

Apparently the drivers are present. Windows just doesn't seem to know it. LOL I can't access the drive because it's not shown in "My Computer" or "Windows Explorer". Does ME need something else?

#4 acklan

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Posted 08 December 2005 - 04:14 PM

Try deleting the USB bus from the Device Manager and any USB device listed. Restart ME and allow ME to reinstall the USB bus, and it should detect the other USB devices and prompt you to install them.
Make sure the USB devices are unplugged before you restart ME.

This post has been edited by acklan: 08 December 2005 - 04:15 PM

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#5 Rimmer

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Posted 09 December 2005 - 10:31 PM

If you originally formatted the external drive as NTFS then it will be invisible under Windows ME since (I'm fairly sure) ME does not support that file system.

If you want to share a hard drive between XP and ME systems then you should format it as FAT32.
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#6 LonMon

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Posted 09 January 2006 - 11:48 PM

So what finally happened here?

I am working a similar issue in that I have Simpletech SimpleDrive Deluxe that I am trying to get working on a Win98se machine. I did the updates to make sure the 98se Storage Supplement was loaded ( www.microsoft.com/windows98/downloads ) and it still wouldn't load. When I used add new hardware and selected have disk and loaded the 98 drivers from the CD it still wouldn't accept them. The instructions say to load them as hard disk controllers. When you do the entry shows under the Hard Disk Device as Hi-Speed USB-IDE Bridge Controller but it has a ! through it indicating an error.

In device manager on the bottom of the list it also has a USB Controller entry with two sub entries - one is Intel® 82801AA Intel Universal Host controller and a second that says USB Root Hub. Might these be an issue? I have a 1Gig Jump drive that works just fine with this controller.

Any ideas?

LonMon

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