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Delta Virtual Airlines Water Cooler | PC Support | External Media Drive

DVA8830
Captain, B757-200

Joined on July 12 2010
50 State Club
Everett Century Club
Double Century Club
DVA Five-Year Anniversary

Mount Jackson, VA

242 legs, 463.9 hours
1 legs, 2.2 hours online
242 legs, 463.9 hours ACARS

Posted onPost created on August 15 2011 09:42 ET by Tom Preziuso

I have a HP Personal Media Drive (750GB External drive hooked up through USB). This hard drive has been very reliable up till now. I have all of my FSX add-on programs on this drive along with a lot of other stuff for FSX. I had to move my Tower so I shut everything down, unhooked all usb's and peripherrals and when I hooked eveything back up, the HP external drive is not recognized and USB port not connected. Changed USB ports and still the same result. I checked all of my drivers and the computer says all of the drivers are up to date.

The weird part is when I hook or unhook the USB cable I can see the HP Media Drive icon in the "Devices and Printers" section of the control panel. IF I unhook the usb, the icon goes away, when I hook it back up the icon reappears and I get an audible tone idicating the icon has reappears, BUT when I click on my computer to view all of my hard drives it is not their. So I have no access to it. And no, I did not make a backup of this ext drive (I know very very dumb).

Any ideas or suggestions would greatly be appreciated.

Tom Preziuso

Captain, B757-200

DVA7016
Senior Captain, B767-300

Joined on February 14 2009
B757 100 Club
Everett 250 Club
Triple Century Club
DVA Five-Year Anniversary

"I5 2500K - 560GTX - 8GB Ripjaw"
Essex GB

385 legs, 1,090.6 hours
384 legs, 1,089.6 hours ACARS
1,821 legs, 4,442.9 hours total

Posted onPost created on August 15 2011 10:11 ET by Alan Barber

Tom - try right clicking on 'My Computer' with the drive connected, select 'Manage' and then select 'disk management' from the left hand menu in the dialog that appears. In the middle of the dialog there are two panes, one lists your partitions (by drive letter) the lower pane lists the physical drives. Does your drive appear in the bottom pane? If so it may just need activating which I THINK you can do by right clicking and bringing up a sub menu. Tread carefully though. Come back to me if you need anything further.

Alan Barber

Senior Captain, B767-300

Posted onPost created on August 15 2011 10:30 ET by Tom Preziuso

My one "My Book external drive is listed there as disc 2, and I have a disc 3 and it says unknown, not initialized. I am sure this is the HP media drive. When I right click it says you must initialize a disk before logical disk manager can access it. Then I have two choices, MBR(master boot record) or GPT(Guid partition table).
The note at the bottom says "The GPT partition style is not recognized by all previous versions of Windows. It is recommended for disks larger than 2TB or disks used on Itanium computers. My HP ext drive is 750GB.

Tom Preziuso

Captain, B757-200

Posted onPost created on August 15 2011 11:00 ET by Alan Barber

Ok Tom - I have done a bit more digging - initializing the disk will wipe all the data from it so hold fire for now - will do some more digging.

Alan Barber

Senior Captain, B767-300

Posted onPost created on August 15 2011 11:07 ET by Alan Barber

Tom, have you tried the drive in another PC? You will need to install drivers for it but it would help you work out if its the drive or your pc/windows that is causing the problem. After that I would reinstall both the HP & your motherboard drivers and see where that gets you. As a last resort you could dismantle the drive caddy take the drive out and connect it up as an internal drive (they are usually SATA) that should enable you to at least get at the data. I had a similar problem with an external drive once and it turned out to be the interface between the drive and the PC that was blown! Let me know if you need anything further.

Alan Barber

Senior Captain, B767-300

Posted onPost created on August 15 2011 11:25 ET by Tom Preziuso

Alan, thank you for all of your input. I am going to try and hook it up to my laptop, if it connects I'll save a backup to that computer and then transfer it to this one. If it doesn't connect, I'll take it to my computer guy and have him do what you said about hooking it up as an internal drive to at least get my data off it. Again thanks for your suggestions. I'll let you know how it turns out!

Tom Preziuso

Captain, B757-200

Posted onPost created on August 15 2011 12:31 ET by Tom Preziuso

Well I tried hooking it up to my laptop and the exact same issue. I was hoping that might work.

Tom Preziuso

Captain, B757-200

Posted onPost created on August 15 2011 13:41 ET by Alan Barber

Looks like the interface between the hard drive and the PC may have given up. I would think the drive itself is okay, the one I had an issue with is still going strong in my pc 2 years down the line - I think I've got FSX installed on it. If the drive is okay and you still want it as an external you could always buy a USB caddy for it - they are quite cheap.

Sorry I wasn't able to help get it working but I suppose at least we have established it's a drive hardware issue.

Alan Barber

Senior Captain, B767-300

Posted onPost created on August 15 2011 15:10 ET by Tom Preziuso

Thanks for your help Alan, I think the USB caddy maybe the best way to go, take a loook at this one for me and let me know what you think. It has twp slots for another drive as well.

Thermaltake ST0014U BlacX Duet Hard Drive Dock - 2-Bay 2.5"/3.5" SATA to USB 2.0, eSATA
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5352947&CatId=2785

Tom Preziuso

Captain, B757-200

Posted onPost created on August 15 2011 16:02 ET by Alan Barber

Looks good to me Tom - wish I could get something like that at that price in the UK!! As you said, will allow for expansion too. Let me know if the HDD is ok and it was just the connection that had gone. If so, once you have the valuable data of of it I would be inclined to give it a thorough scan (plus surface check) and defrag.

Alan Barber

Senior Captain, B767-300

Posted onPost created on August 15 2011 17:58 ET by Tom Preziuso

Well I decided to go an even cheaper route. I am going to install it as a hard drive and hopefully it will work, I went to my computer guy this afternoon and since I still have a 1 TB WD "My book" ecternal drive already on my system, I am going to install this hp media drive as an additional internal drive and then hook up the additional My books external drive and back everything up from the the entire computer on the new external drive I will install. I had to buy another SATA cable for $4.50.

I asked Darren (computer guy) what good software is out there for managing and backing up drives/files to a certain location.

He said to ise Ecronis - True Image- Home Edition. He said he uses it and likes it alot.. I'll let you know how the install goes for the additional internal drive and if it works or not.

Tom Preziuso

Captain, B757-200

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