http://www.ismart.com.sg/v2/iSmart Desktop StorageSATASeries3.5.php my brother bought me this 500GB external hard drive back from Thailand for Christmas. christmas morning i was quite excited. i plugged the hard drive into the one of the usb ports, turned on the power on the hard drive and booted up my laptop. the hard drive made some noises as i was doing so which i took as a good sign. my computer also took a little longer to get to my desktop which i assumed meant that everything was working as it should be....unfortunately, this was not the case. windows didn't recognize that i had anything plugged into it. i would really appreciate someone giving me some idea for why this might be happening or if they've had any similar problems. i plan to take it to my local computer repair shop as soon as they re-open but thats not until the 12th of January and to be honest, i trust the community here much more than i trust any computer store. edit: the same thing happens on every other computer that i've tried.
right click my computer go to properties. click on device manager and check to see whether theres a yellow Question mark on it? also try a different usb port. see if that helps
Lol just to check, there is actually a hard drive in there right? That's just an enclosure you put a hard disk in!
I'm going to have to join sammorris and ask that you actually check inside the enclosure. The webpage you referenced refers to two different models, one USB2.0 and the other ESATA + USB2.0 . And, it says that the enclosures are either 250GB or 500GB. So, make sure you have a good hard drive in the enclosure (coming out of Thailand for a traveler? They could say anything knowing you're not going to be back tomorrow to ask for the rest of the hardware). Also (though I presume you have since you said you put this unit on multiple computers) are you using a USB2.0 connection and not an older 1.0? The other 'obvious' things: you did connect the power brick? Some devices can partially run off the USB power, but need the full brick voltage to operate correctly. Did the lights "twinkle" as the ad states? Does it have a cooling fan on the enclosure and you see/hear it spinning? If all the obvious things are eliminated, then pop open that enclosure and take a look at the internal cabling. Maybe something wiggled loose in the trip. Lastly, swap the 'we hope it is there' hard drive out of the enclosure and put in another known good one. If it doesn't work after that, then the enclosure and its hardware is the culprit. If it does work, then it's a bad drive. Best of luck, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope for you -- foreign bought 'bargains' are wild shots. It so often pays to just buy retail from a good priced site like Newegg.
thanks for the replies everyone. the power brick was definately plugged in. there wasn't any yellow question mark and i've tried all the different usb ports on a few different computers (all usb 2.0 as far as i know). lol yeah there is a hard drive in there. that was one of the first things i thought of. i opened up the case, made sure it was there, then closed it up again. there didn't seem to be anything out of order and i didn't want to screw around with any of the wires too much in fear of damaging it (i'm still hoping theres a way to get it working). the lights didn't "twinkle" at all. they were both a solid blue until i turned on my computer at which point one of them changed to green. i guess this is kinda strange. there wasn't any fan in the enclosure but i don't think there's one in the ad either. thanks for all your help. i might open up the case again and have a better look inside. maybe i missed something.
Just an additional comment, as I know from experience: When an external DVD burner failed on me and I chose to upgrade to a newer model anyway, I smoked two replacements in a row. I had bought the OEM drives and put them into a new enclosure. They would work for a few days then suddenly not respond to the system at all. Hmm, bad drive I thought, and replaced it with the second. Smoked it a couple of days later. Obviously, my problem wasn't with the drives, but the power supply / converter on the enclosure. (Which, on investigation, sure did smell like smoke.) So, since you've looked at all the obvious things, maybe you shouldn't take my advice as to swapping in a new drive into the enclosure. If you've got the cabling inside your PC, you might consider pulling the drive and just powering it up directly connected to your system. Either it'll work, or it won't. This would be less risky than putting a good drive into a killer enclosure.
Yeah putting the drive in a pc would be safer than in the ? enclosure. You might just disconnect the ribbon cable from HDD in the ? enclosure and plug ?encl back in the pc and see what the pc does in device manager.
won't be able to connect drive internally in laptop as drive is 3.5" & laptops' are 2.5". powerup external drive after laptop's os is loaded to see if have problem still.
okay, i think this problem is beyond my power to fix. powering up the hard drive after windows had loaded didn't make any difference and if there's a possibility that it's the case that's causing the problem, i don't want to kill another hard drive by putting it into that case. i'll just wait until the computer repair shop re-opens. i seriously doubt they'll be able to do anything if my experiences with them in the past are anything to go by, but just maybe i'll be lucky this time.... if not, it's a nice paper weight. thanks again for your help.
with the drive plugged in, go to: Start->Right click My Computer->Manage->Disk Management Does your drive show up there? Does it say "Unreadable" or "Unformatted"
Again, what core2kid said, is the drive showing up as a physical drive in disk management? It's possible that it's damaged or just unformatted as core2kid said or perhaps windows has assigned it a letter of an existing drive in which case it wouldn't show up until you change the drive letter, right click on the partition and choose change drive letter, use a letter not currently used (assuming a partition exists, if not try creating one on the disk). Long shot but worth a try.
Then I would think that the enclosure is bad. See if you can pick up a spare enclosure and switch the HD into that.
Just a thought mate... You got this in Thailand and it's from a Singaporean brand right? Doesn't take a genius to know they manufacture some shoddy shit and most of it doesn't even have a guarantee. If it came with any kind of warranty I'd send it back to be repaired, otherwise it looks like it's faulty.
Definitely try it inside the PC. There are plenty of companies that make abysmal quality enclosures, but there are no abysmal quality hard drives thank heavens.
sorry i haven't replied sooner. i've been away on holidays. i ended up taking my hard drive to the computer shop and it turns out that it's completely stuffed. apparently the case was fine but the hard drive had been dropped or something and is now beyond repair. thank you all for your advise. a lesson has been learned on foreign "bargains".
To get some of your money back you could try to sell the enclosure with the broken hard drive separately on ebay.
Hi, not sure i`m in the right thread but here goes, just aquired new external drive.Works perfect with all programmes except dvd shrink.When i select back up target in shrink it does not recognise the new drive, only ISO Image file or Hard disk drive.Old external no prob. Anybody help please
