Mounting WinXP

[SalJustSal]

I just got an external hard drive for my Sony Vaio Grx laptop. I'm plugging it in my firewire port. When I do so the enclosure pops up in the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the taskbar - so it seems to recognize it. However, I am unable to access or format the drive at all; it doesn't mount in the "My Computer" folder like drives normally do.

I've also checked in the networking folders to see if it treats it as a network device rather than hardware. Again nothing. It doesn't appear anywhere.

Any help would be greatly appreciated,

Sal

 

[Jeyan]

Is it showing up in your C-MOS??? If so try booting with it, and you can format it from there and istall yoru operating system.

 

[moskus]

When I do so the enclosure pops up in the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in the taskbar - so it seems to recognize it.

Did you get a CD with drivers or something? Just because you might "Safely remove" the device, doesen't mean that WinXP can access it.

Boot the PC without the external harddrive connected.
Open the Device Manager (Right-click on My Computer -> Properties -> Hardware -> Click the Device Manager button).
Connect the harddrive.
See what device is added you get when you connect it.

My guess it would be a "Unknown device". Then you need to install the drivers for it. Just the same thing I had to do when installing my digital camera. It should appear as a harddrive and I didn't install the drivers for it...

 

[SalJustSal]

Is it showing up in your C-MOS??? If so try booting with it, and you can format it from there and istall yoru operating system.

No it doesn't show up in my CMOS. I expect it wouldn't because it's a firewire external device and an OS would be needed to load it. Maybe I'm wrong though.

moskus,

Did you get a CD with drivers or something? Just because you might "Safely remove" the device, doesen't mean that WinXP can access it.

The manual says no drivers are needed.

Boot the PC without the external harddrive connected.
Open the Device Manager (Right-click on My Computer -> Properties -> Hardware -> Click the Device Manager button).
Connect the harddrive.
See what device is added you get when you connect it.

Did it. The device shows up in 2 different areas. It shows up in the "Disk Drives" section as "Oxford 911G IEEE 1393 SB2 Device". Then down the line appears an "SB2 IEEE1394 Device" section appears. There is no yellow exclamation point by them.

When I go inside the Oxford listing, I can ask it to poplulate volumes. When I do so it seems to recognize the hard drive, showing 58636 MB.

Thanks for the help guys, but I'm still stuck...

 

[SalJustSal]

Somebody on another board helped me with this. I'm going to post it here for the benefit of others. Keep in mind this is only for XP. What you do...

Right-click on my computer and choose Manage.
Then from this window choose Disk Management.
In the lower right box was my hard drive, but it was shaded.
I right-clicked on it and chose Initialize.

Hope this helps someone.