making an extral hd

i have a wd400 hd out of my old dell which was working.
i placed it into a me-720 series enclosure. the pc will see it under device manger but it has a yellow exclamation point shown. it is not listed under removable storage in my computer.i called there tech support line. was told the hd might not be compatible with there unit. is this possible? i have the jumper set to ma if it matters!.

thanks ad

 

The Me-720 is a bit of a useless drive enclosure. I'd suggest you try it with a different enclosure. Most boxes will read most drives, and not bake them like the Me-720 will.

 

do you have any models that work well?
i figured the me720 was ok with the fan it had.

 

The Me-320 is supposed to be a lot better, because it supports large sized drives (i.e. CD-ROM types) it has enough room to adequately cool a hard disk.

 

i have the drive jumped to master position. your saying try no jumper?

 

Certainly if it's a Western Digital drive try that. Even if not, it may be worth a try.

 

thank you
all is working well with it.
i just have to format it now..
what is the purpose of partitioning a hd?

 

Partitions effectively split a single hard drive (or array) into multiple 'drives'. Whilst the process will impair the speed of the drive somewhat, it makes it easier to manage multiple roles off the same drive. (For example it means you can completely reformat one sector to get rid of a windows install if you've had issues with it, whilst keeping all your personal data on the same hard drive)

 

thank you
i see it might be ideal to do that to this one. when using it as a external hd and partitioned can i pick the sections i want to storage data in?

 

Yes. Partitioning a drive off basically gives you two (or more) drive letters. Pick which one you want, in the same way that you'd do so for multiple hard drives.

 

to make my single partition drive a multiple partitions drive will i have to back up my data on it or will it be ok there?

 

If you want to suddenly make a single partition drive a multi-partition one when it already has data on it, it's doable, but you need something like Acronis DiskDirector to do it.

 

what if i dont care about the stuff on it. does disc manger do this too?

 

It can, but only if it's a blank unformatted volume I think. So you obviously can't do it if it's the drive with windows on it.

 

i am just using this drive as an removeable external drive to store some pic's. but it got me curious when multiple paritions where mentioned . this way i can have my stuff in the differnt parts.

so i will assume windows does not run off it.
it was and old dell main drive which i formatted the other day.
now i like'd to add 2 more paritions to it.
keep in mind i am still learning

 

Well, you can reformat it to have multiple partitions, but for a pictures drive is that really necessary? The drive will run faster if you just use folders.

 

at this point i am just playing around now. but the info is appreicated!

yes right now they are in indv folders. maybe i will joint them to one folder