hey all,
havent posted here in, oh, a year or so - it's good to be back after my study-induced retirement.
ok now that the niceties are over, on to the problem.
i recently bought a 30gb creative nomad zen xtra. for all those who dont know what that is - it's a laptop disk drive (aka 2.5" hdd) based mp3 jukebox.
i bought it with the full intent of modding it by swapping the drive inside with an 80gb drive. this i managed to do successfully. if not for the 30gb label outside, you wouldnt know that the player was not meant to have an 80gb capacity. in essence, it works perfectly with the 80gb snug inside (do take note here).
what did i do with the now-spare 30gb? i intended to convert it into a portable 2.5" removable usb2.0 hdd. to this end i purchased one of those aluminium casings with a pcb that connects directly to my 2.5" drive and offers usb2.0 transfers.
so i fixed everything up, and plugged it in. my system (win xp pro, all sps installed) recognised the drive (Fujitsu MHT2030AT), auto-installed drivers and told me that 'my mass storage device [is] now ready for use.'
BUT i couldnt use it. simply put, the computer did not recognise ANYTHING abt the drive, other than it's name. it ALSO did NOT show up as a removable drive under 'my computer'. i can ONLY find out abt the drive's existence through system manager, and even then it CANNOT identify the drive's capacity correctly, or anything else it correctly. attempts to populate the drive info screen result in a message telling me that my drive is not formatted in a way that windows can read.
i simply cannot get my computer to recognise the drive in any form OTHER than a direct IDE connection (with a handly 40 to 44 pin adaptor). and WHEN i DO connect it via IDE, i CAN do a low-level format, fdisk, etc etc. i've formatted the drive at least 15 times now - at times doing a normal <format C:> and at other times doing a <format C: /s> after fdisking and removing-then-recreating the primary DOS partition. each time this process would complete successfully - it would tell me that i had successfully formatted 28517mb in FAT32 in one primary DOS partition. scandisk (native DOS ver through win98 startup disk, not winxp version) would be able to completely run through and verfiy that the FAT and data areas are fine. BUT the drive would still remain unrecognisable in winxp and win98, which i tried out of desperation.
i've verified that the casing+usb2.0pcb is not to blame - it works perfectly with another 20gb 2.5" hdd i have.
a fellow [H]-er and good friend of mine, Hard|Core, raised the point that perhaps my 30gb drive is not 'complete' in the sense that it might lack some controllers - but i'm confused - for all intents and purposes, this SHOULD be a perfectly normal drive (ie not lacking any controllers). after all didnt i replace it with a COMPLETE (ie definitely not lacking any controllers) 80gb that was meant for the mass market? and didnt my 80gb drive work PERFECTLY in the zen?
and finally, in case you're wondering, i did replace the 30gb back in the zen again and it DID work PERFECTLY in the zen, so why not here?? it spins up like it has always done, and there is activity. it is NOT a dead drive.
help!!
havent posted here in, oh, a year or so - it's good to be back after my study-induced retirement.
ok now that the niceties are over, on to the problem.
i recently bought a 30gb creative nomad zen xtra. for all those who dont know what that is - it's a laptop disk drive (aka 2.5" hdd) based mp3 jukebox.
i bought it with the full intent of modding it by swapping the drive inside with an 80gb drive. this i managed to do successfully. if not for the 30gb label outside, you wouldnt know that the player was not meant to have an 80gb capacity. in essence, it works perfectly with the 80gb snug inside (do take note here).
what did i do with the now-spare 30gb? i intended to convert it into a portable 2.5" removable usb2.0 hdd. to this end i purchased one of those aluminium casings with a pcb that connects directly to my 2.5" drive and offers usb2.0 transfers.
so i fixed everything up, and plugged it in. my system (win xp pro, all sps installed) recognised the drive (Fujitsu MHT2030AT), auto-installed drivers and told me that 'my mass storage device [is] now ready for use.'
BUT i couldnt use it. simply put, the computer did not recognise ANYTHING abt the drive, other than it's name. it ALSO did NOT show up as a removable drive under 'my computer'. i can ONLY find out abt the drive's existence through system manager, and even then it CANNOT identify the drive's capacity correctly, or anything else it correctly. attempts to populate the drive info screen result in a message telling me that my drive is not formatted in a way that windows can read.
i simply cannot get my computer to recognise the drive in any form OTHER than a direct IDE connection (with a handly 40 to 44 pin adaptor). and WHEN i DO connect it via IDE, i CAN do a low-level format, fdisk, etc etc. i've formatted the drive at least 15 times now - at times doing a normal <format C:> and at other times doing a <format C: /s> after fdisking and removing-then-recreating the primary DOS partition. each time this process would complete successfully - it would tell me that i had successfully formatted 28517mb in FAT32 in one primary DOS partition. scandisk (native DOS ver through win98 startup disk, not winxp version) would be able to completely run through and verfiy that the FAT and data areas are fine. BUT the drive would still remain unrecognisable in winxp and win98, which i tried out of desperation.
i've verified that the casing+usb2.0pcb is not to blame - it works perfectly with another 20gb 2.5" hdd i have.
a fellow [H]-er and good friend of mine, Hard|Core, raised the point that perhaps my 30gb drive is not 'complete' in the sense that it might lack some controllers - but i'm confused - for all intents and purposes, this SHOULD be a perfectly normal drive (ie not lacking any controllers). after all didnt i replace it with a COMPLETE (ie definitely not lacking any controllers) 80gb that was meant for the mass market? and didnt my 80gb drive work PERFECTLY in the zen?
and finally, in case you're wondering, i did replace the 30gb back in the zen again and it DID work PERFECTLY in the zen, so why not here?? it spins up like it has always done, and there is activity. it is NOT a dead drive.
help!!