#&^@*@ fujitsu 2.5" drive - experts needed

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[H]ossman

Gawd
Joined
Sep 15, 2001
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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!! :(
 
ok I already know what your problem is, but I dont know how to fix it, at least not off the top of my head.

The problem is that your hard drive isn't formatted ("drive is not formatted in a way that windows can read.") in NTFS nor is it a version of FATxx/x

Thus what you need to do is SOME how format it into NTFS or FAT... This is where it gets tricky and where my expertice wanes... I'll look into it but I won't promise anything as I doubt there is anything that can do it.

~Adam

PS on a second thought why would the 80 gig drive work as it's probably formatted in fat32 or ntfs... hmmm, only thing I can think of is that that controller on the mp3 player can use ntfs but it's native format is NOT ntfs or fatxx/x...
 
Originally posted by CleanSlate
ok I already know what your problem is, but I dont know how to fix it, at least not off the top of my head.

The problem is that your hard drive isn't formatted ("drive is not formatted in a way that windows can read.") in NTFS nor is it a version of FATxx/x

Thus what you need to do is SOME how format it into NTFS or FAT... This is where it gets tricky and where my expertice wanes... I'll look into it but I won't promise anything as I doubt there is anything that can do it.

~Adam
Click to expand...

He already said that he tried formatting it.

Have you looked up any information on the drive itself, like model numbers etc?
 
You need to initialize the drive (partition it also).

Go into Control Panel, Administraive tools, Computer management, storage, disk management.

You'll see the drive here. Right click on the drive in the left tab and hit initialize disk, then you want to right click on the right part of it and create a partition and format it.

The MP3 player likely uses a proprietary type of partition which isn't recognized by WinXP.
 
thanks for the input guys - i'll give that a shot when i get home later.

but malingc - havent i already done a low-level FAT32 format via dos?
 
mobiux, i did look up the drive. i stated the model number in my first post (MHT2030AT), and i also checked online at the fujitsu hdd website - the drive is considered OEM.


however, the model number corressponds exactly to a model of fujitsu hardrive that is available on the mass market.
 
did you leave 8 megs unformatted (it ussually does this automatically, but it sounds liek you fucked with the drive alot) the extra unformatted drive is used to keep info for the clusters of info on your hard drive (or some such) and is necessary.

~Adam

PS you could email the maker of the drive and ask them why it doesn't work as they have very specialized knowledge of the drive, and you might want to mention specifically where you got it from.
 
Originally posted by [H]ossman
thanks for the input guys - i'll give that a shot when i get home later.

but malingc - havent i already done a low-level FAT32 format via dos?
Click to expand...

Do what I said anyway, you'd be amazed what that utility can do.
 
ok strangely my drive has begun WORKING NORMALLY, but ONLY if i leave the cover off the usb's aluminum casing. ???????????????? wtf? :(

also, i managed to format it via disk manager, then did a scandisk. but the scandisk took unusually long (5 hrs). any comments on that?
 
Umm 5 hours? sounds like the hard drive is so corrupt that scan disk had to chop sectors off... did it go to a big grey screen with blocks on it and then a bunch of yellow blocks replced teh grey blocks? Those yellow blocks show you how many bad sectors you ahve on the drive... I dunno man.. something's definetaly up- like I said call the mfg.

~Adam
 
i emailed fujitsu and they were ABSOLUTELY unhelpful.. they refused to give me a final word on ANYTHING. they wouldnt even say whether the drive was a 'full'drive with all parts present and accounted for!

cleanslate, if it makes any difference - i had checked the lower box on the xp scandisk dialog box - something along the lines of check for bad sectors iirc.

the vast majority of the scandisk took place during 'phase 2' of scandisk. anyone knwo what that was? there was no screen showing blocks. just a smaller dialog box that came out showing progress. scandisk was accessed via mycomputer>rightclick-driveF:>properties>tools>scan.
 
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