USB HDD problem

[Jeff]

I acquired a 1.8in 20g hard-drive from work. It is originally the internal memory from an Eclipse DVD/Navigation unit which lost its disc drive and was mutilated by one of my co-workers to get a disc out. He tossed the HDD in the trash...and I was quick to retrieve it. It is a Hitachi Travelstar. I got a USB2.0 case for it off ebay, got it all together and hooked up. Vista recognizes it in device manager, but when I go to disk management I get an error when I try to initialize the disc. I can get it to show up on my XP machine in device manager, but it won't show in disk utility. Any ideas? Is it possible it has some file system on it that windows can't understand? Both machines see it as the correct model number as a "USB mass storage device." Is there anything I can do to manually format it and clear it out so I can initialize the disc in windows?

[Jeff]

BTW, when I plug the USB in I can hear the drive spinning and the LED comes on green to indicate "idle" I have never seen it go red (accessing).

[Mike]

right click -> format.

[Jeff]

where? I have seen no such thing. Vista says it must initialize the drive before it can format...

[Mike]

my computer. if it's not showing up there AND you can't get squat working in disk management, throw it in the trash and chalk this up to "i should have bought something that worked for $20 on ebay."

[CaptainHenreh]

my computer. if it's not showing up there AND you can't get squat working in disk management, throw it in the trash and chalk this up to "i should have bought something that worked for $20 on ebay."

Rofl. Disk Management sees the volume, but can't initialize it. It's not in My Computer at all. So, I dunno. When this kind of shit happens at work, I call my boss and say 'We need a new hard drive'.

[Jeff]

I acutally spent $16. Thought it didn't exactly end up working so far. I'm going to see if the company I bought the case from has anything to say.

[Ginger]

At the risk of sounding silly - are there any jumpers that could be set wrong?

[Jeff]

I looked, as far as I can tell it has no jumpers. Its a ZIF drive.

[ViPER1313]

To Create and Format a Partition (volume)

If there is an existing partition on the hard drive, delete it. If you are retarded and repartition your computer's internal HD, don't come and cry to me. Format using NTFS.

[Ginger]

Wouldn't Fat 32 work mo betta? Windows can still read/write it, but so can 'nix based stuff.

[Jeff]

Thanks for the link Adam, but to no avail. I guess the hard drive might be boned? Is there any way to check this? The case might be the problem...after all...it was like $8.