I ripped a few movies in a SATA drive that I haven't used since last year. So I ripped the movies into the SATA HD via SATA connection. But when I installed the SATA to my Antec MX-100 USB enclosure, as an external HD, the PC recognizes it as a USB Mass storage...but does not show in My Computer (my personal laptop)as a drive. Which means I cannot access my movies from this external HD. Am I missing a step here? Thanks in advance
If its a sata enclosure, have you tried using external Sata or E-Sata. Maybe the controller card is bad? Is the drive assigned a leter in computer managment/Disk managment? File system is typically not the colprete, but is it FAT32, NTFS?
sorry, my external enclosure connects only via USB. I've tried two desktops, and one laptop, all showing as a USB Mass storage in the Device Manager. Nothing in My Computer as a storage, like when you use a USB flash drive. When I first formatted it was NTFS. After that it was assigned a drive letter (G) in Disk Management. Thanks in advance
I went to Disk Management and the disk is read as: "Dynamic" and "Foreign"....my option is to "Convert to Basic Disk", which will reformat my drive and lose data... ...and I'm at work for 16hrs...me, WinXP Home laptop, and my USB external enclosure/SATA HD formatted originally in a WinXP PRO desktop. I guess I wait till I get home
The file system is unrecognised. Try attaching the PC directly into your PC rather than using the USB enclosure. If the same thing, the drive is bad. If it works fine, the enclosure is bad.
Did you originally have the SATA HD in your PC as part of a disk group? (Disk group = bunch of disks used together in either spanned, mirrored or even a RAID setup). Windows checks the end of Dynamic disks for a 1Mb region used for configuration of a disk group. If it finds it, It will tell you that the disk is Dynamic / Foreign aslong as it finds it in a different configuration. This may be the case as you are not using the device on the SATA ports on the PC but a USB port. I am sure you can migrate the information from the SATA Disk to your PC if you connect the HD back to your pc etc, which is the easiest option. If you have moved a dynamic disk from one computer to another, you can use the steps below to import it. The steps below assume that you have already physically added the foreign disk to the computer. 1. Click Start and click Run. 2. Type diskmgmt.msc and click OK. 3. From the Action menu, click Rescan Disks. 4. Right click the disk marked as Foreign and click Import Foreign Disks. 5. Follow the onscreen instructions to complete the process. This should do the trick, however I'm not sure if it makes the SATA drive readable with all the information still on it, or if it transfers the data to your PC, in which case you will need to have enough space on your pc to transfer the files. If it was part of a windows based RAID then you will probably only be able to transfer it if it was a mirrored setup, and not a spanned setup. Let us know how it goes
That was it! It was in Dynamic. So I transferred files from SATA HD to my WINXPPRO desktop. Converted to Basic, reformat to NTFS, retransferred from desktop to SATA again...AND IT WORKS! My WINXP HOME laptop reads it as extra storage,able to pull my movie files...now I can do another 16 HRS at work. Many thanks to everyone who helped and educated me. Hope to share this knowledge to someone else.