I just bought a USB External Hard Drive. But when I plug it into my laptop and
Desktop computers, both running Win XP Pro, the system recognized it immediately
And there is an "Safely remove Hardware" icon shown on the right bottom. But I can not find out the drive volume letter for this USB drive in "Windows Explorer".
In "Device Manager", I can find "USB mass storage Device" working properly, "Location 0 (JM20338 SATA, USB Combo)".
But in "Administrative Tools", "Computer Management", "Storage", "Removable Storage" and "Disk Management", I cannot find the drive neither. The drive is pre-formatted as
FAT32.

Thanks a lot guys.

I would recommend reformating it with NTFS so that it will accept files larger than 4gb. Also ensure that the drive is partitioned, as no drive letter can be assigned to un-parttitioned space. After those are complete, check out this link to Microsoft, as this is a fairly common problem. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;297694 Windows appears to be lazy in regards to external drives.
Good Luck

Go back into Disk Management and reformat the drive to NTFS, that should fix the problem.

You might not need to format the drive again. Sometimes USB drives won't show up because there's a drive letter conflict. Before you try formatting, right-click on My Computer, choose Manage, double-click Storage, and double-click Disk Management. Scroll to see if your USB drive is there and then change the drive letter.

You might not need to format the drive again. Sometimes USB drives won't show up because there's a drive letter conflict. Before you try formatting, right-click on My Computer, choose Manage, double-click Storage, and double-click Disk Management. Scroll to see if your USB drive is there and then change the drive letter.

Ok, here's the dumb question, how do I change the drive letter? :confused:

Ok, here's the dumb question, how do I change the drive letter? :confused:


Right click!!