A new client brought over a WD 2500JS External USB Hard Drive with some videos on it for me to transcribe. I thought I could just plug it in and go, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. I should probably know this already, but do I need specific drivers for it to even show up? Under “My Computer” I see my C and D drive. If I plug a flash drive in, it shows up there as well. This WD drive does not, but yet when I plug it in, the computer says it’s found a new device. I don’t really want to download drivers for someone else’s device onto my computer. (I also went into avast to scan the folders in the drive and couldn’t find it there either. Would never access something like this w/o scanning first!)
Am I wrong to expect it to show up as say an “F” (or some other letter) drive along with the C and D drives (like a flash drive or digital camera does)? Or do I need to download software/drivers to use it (which I don’t want to do since it’s not mine)?
Sorry if this seems elementary, but I’ve never used an external hard drive before!
Am I wrong to expect it to show up as say an "F" (or some other letter) drive along with the C and D drives (like a flash drive or digital camera does)?
I just did and same outcome…doesn’t show up. It’s like it’s not even there except it does show up under hardware in device manager and that says it’s “working fine.” Same for my computer. When I tried to scan it with avast, it didn’t scan anything. But I can easily scan a flash drive connected to that same USB port.
Thanks, Pondus. Since it’s not even my drive, I think I’ll just call the client and tell him I can’t get it to work on either computer. I just wanted to post here first to see if I was missing something since I’d never worked with an external HD before.
When I got an external hard drive I had to assign it a drive letter before it would show up in explorer…this had to be done from “computer management”.
This was a seagate drive, and win 7, so not sure about the relevance…
Scott,I Googled your thought of assigning a drive letter and it does seem that might be the issue. XP is not assigning it a drive letter at all. But in following the directions I found, XP is not giving me the option to assign it a letter. I read somewhere that a drive has to be partitioned to be assigned a letter (don’t know if that’s correct). Disk Management says this drive has an “unknown partition.” Again, since it’s not my drive, I can’t mess around with the actual drive. The other computer I tried it on is running Vista.
(Some of this stuff I’m reading is just shooting right over my head…LOL!)
Try a USB port on the back of PC sometimes this helps and don’t use a hub. If it’s a powered drive try a different receptacle. These WD drives can be a real pain. Is this an actual WD external or a WD drive in a third party enclosure?
Joe