Solved Win 8 Cannot find external HDD

Hi Everybody , any help much appreciated

I have purchased from a local electronics store, an after market HDD drive housing to enable me to use a surplus 450GB IDE hdd from a now defunct computer.

Once assembled I plugged it in ( it comes with its own power pack , and uses a USB cable to connect to the computer )

Win8 knows it is there and installed a driver called - USB to IDE bridge. there the problem starts

I am unable to see the drive in explorer or anything . either as a mass storage device or an external drive.

Do I have to register the drive or anything , and if so how - shouldnt win8 do this automatically ?? I have another HDD ( more modern one ) and windows see's that straight away.

Any help much Appreciated

Does it show up in Disk Management ??

Hi WHS , thanks for the prompt reply.

No it does not appear in disk management

Regards

Hmm, then the system really does not recognize it. My next guess would be that this generic driver which was installed does not work for it. You can go on the manufacturers website and check whether they have any /8 ot /7 driver for it. Chances are probably slim since IDE has long gone out of style.

Hi WHS Thanks for the prompt reply again.

I have solved the problem. I have another IDE drive from the the same old computer ( it had 2 ) so I tried that one in the disk housing and it worked immediately. Great.

So I then thought, I wonder if it has something to do with the jumper settings on the offending drive. It was set to "master" so i swapped it to slave, the same as the working drive. Re-inserted it into the housing and wammo it works as well.

So a lesson for all , and thanks once again for your help.

Very good. Those IDE drives sure are tricky. Thanks for reporting back. That will be useful for others.

Win8 not seeing external HDD via USB

This was the fastest resolution of a problem ever, lol! Great job, and thanks for posting it..


One other issue that you may find is that you have to keep going into DISK MGMT everytime to have windows show it as a drive.

If you want windows to recognize it as soon as you plug it in without having to go through DISK MGMT is to :

First recognize the Drive through DISK MGMT and assign it a drive letter

Then go to COMPUTER select the removable drive then (right click) then (properties)

Select (hardware)

Find your harddrive in the list then select it, then click (properties), then (policies)

Select (better performance) and not (quick removal)

Thats it.. you will have to use the (Safely Remove Hardware) icon in your system tray before removing this drive from now on to make sure there is nothing in the cache waiting to be written, but that only takes a few seconds, and saves the BIG TO DO of DISK MGMT everytime you plug it in...

Also performance and file transfer speed should improve..

Brooklyn!

Hi Brooklyn, thanks for the help

However since I have achieved a solution , everything has worked just sweet , with no problems from windows at all.
I have also followed your recommendations without resetting anything, and have learned a great deal about the "internals" of windows 8 and how it manages things. Thanks once again ..

Kind Regards
Slicerman

So Brooklyn , how did you resolve this problem.

I changed the HD policy from quick removal to best performance..
Im thinking now that maybe my old dock had PNP or drivers in its rom and i didnt have to do this, but with my current dock I do.
I still have it, ill dig it out and see ill re-edit this and let you know..