Older Western Digital hard drive in USB 2 external enclosure?

Howdy! I've been trying to help a friend via telephone who's trying to get
an older Western Digital 6.4gb drive working in an external USB enclosure on
a system running Windows XP. He has several old drives he is trying to
extract old files from and bought a USB2 based external enclosure for this
purpose. The Seagate drives he plugs in all come right up but the WD 6.4 gig
drive gives no joy.

My first thought was to tell him to *carefully* examine the jumper settings
on the drive and try various settings for single, master and cable select as
show at the WD support web site here: http://tinyurl.com/5t387

So far no luck.

I haven't been able to physically see what he has done and he is *not* an
experienced computer person (though he has had some past training in
electronics and radio communications) so I can't verify that he has the
jumpers set correctly beyond the "no jumpers" single drive setting I told
him to try which also did not work.

He tells me that when he installs the drive the drive access LED goes to the
yellow "on" state and stays there. Windows XP on his HP system *seems* to
pick the drive up very briefly (the "two tone" alert for new hardware found
plays) before sounding an error "boing" a split second later.

WD has a list of symptoms for incorrectly jumpered drives
(http://tinyurl.com/3shme)

They also say that their drives should work in an external enclosure (I'm
using an 80 gig external WD at home right now) but that they do not support
them in that configuration. (http://tinyurl.com/4l26j)


Any suggestions? The constant on "drive access" LED makes me wonder if this
drive hasn't just failed.

 

Oxford Systems wrote:

[snip]

Has he tried it with the jumper removed? If the drive is the only one
on a cable, the master/slave jumper must be removed.

 

On 12 Sep 2004, Oxford Systems wrote

-snip tries-

That would be my guess.

I put a 1997 WD hard drive -- 3.2 GB -- in a USB 2 external caddy, and
it worked fine. (FWIW, this was on Win98SE, and I left it jumpered for
"master".)

 

Sorry, I see that you did try that. That's what I get for skimming the
post. No other ideas, sorry.

 

Yeah, I'm pretty much out of ideas myself. He did tell me that the PC this
drive originally came out of was going "flaky" before he stopped using it
which sort of reinforces the idea that the drive itself might have been
failing. I might advise him to try a couple of the old time tricks to see if
we can get the thing to access the platters at least one more time since he
says it is spinning up. Deep freeze and/or oven, here we come!

 

As a long shot, if it is an old drive there may be a lack of
sufficient power problem. Can the enclosure be powered from another
source? If it can may be worth giving it a try.

 

The drive may have failed, but consider this.

My XP installation is on FAT32 because I chose to do it that way and it
definitely won't read NTFS drives through a USB port.

An XP installation normally uses NTFS disc format, so maybe it won't read
the old FAT through a USB port.

I would try coupling it to a computer in place of the computers CD drive,
copying its contents to a folder on the main drive.

Just a thought.

 

Oxford Systems vaguely muttered something like ...

Has he tried using the hd as a slave or master directly to the internal IDE
of the computer and verified it actually works ?

I'd also look at power supply .. ISTR that USB was 3.3v and HD's are 5v ..
though this is a generality rather than specific ..



--
Paul ...

(8(|) Homer Rules !!!

"A tosser is a tosser, no matter what mode of transport they're using."

 

Howdy!

Why not? I've never had any trouble doing that. My walky drive is
32G FAT32, and the remainder of the 80G NTFS - and I can read both on 2K and
XP.

Again, see above.

You seem to be making the same mistake some newbies do about the
capability of the OS vis the formats used on the disks ...

RwP

 

Bet it will.

Even Win98 can be made to read NTFS formatted drives. (Can't write to 'em
however.)

It will and it does. My XP installation is NTFS and I access all manner of
FAT16 and FAT32 devices via USB.

I finally got my hands on the drive and enclosure yesterday and made a
puzzling discovery. I have a laptop that has USB 1.1 ports built in and for
which I have a PCMCIA card to provide USB 2 support. When you plug the drive
into the USB2 card it gives the same symptoms. The drive not recognized by
Windows and drive access light constantly on. When you plug into the USB 1.1
legacy ports it comes right up and works just fine.

I know my PCMCIA card works because I use it with my own external USB2 hard
drive (which has a combination of NTFS and FAT32 partitions which are all
accessible under XP) and an external USB2 CD-RW every day without any
problems.

 

I had the drive in my hands yesterday and installed it into an old IBM
Pentium 166 (not even MMX!) system on the secondary IDE channel and it came
right up. After that we put it back in the enclosure and tested it with my
laptop.

My laptop only has USB 1.1 ports built in and I have a PCMCIA card to
provide USB 2 support.

On the laptop's USB 1.1 ports I was able to extract all the files he wanted
to recover. I was able to run a virus scan on the drive and defrag it. I was
able to write to the drive and delete files. But plugged into the USB 2
PCMCIA card? No go! The drive access light goes hard yellow as if the drive
is being accessed and Windows does not "see" the drive in My Computer,
Explorer or the Disk Management Console.

The external enclosure has its own power supply so the drive isn't trying to
run off of USB supplied power (which IIRC is 5 volts, 1 amp max.)

Short version: The drive is fine. The enclosure works with this drive when
plugged into USB 1.1 ports. It does not work with this drive when plugged
into USB2 ports either on his 2.6 GHz P4 based HP desktop or on my laptop
through the PCMCIA card. If you substitute another disk drive like a Seagate
(or even an older smaller capacity WD) it works just fine on both USB 1 and
2.

Weird.

 

Oxford Systems vaguely muttered something like ...

Heheheh, at least it works now ..


--
Paul ...

(8(|) Homer Rules !!!

"A tosser is a tosser, no matter what mode of transport they're using."