Thursday, February 21, 2008
Getting Vista to recognize your external storage

I just encountered a really weird issue with Windows Vista, where an external Western Digital hard drive (an older My Book 250GB) would show up as a mass storage device, but was not allocated a drive letter and was basically inaccessible. The weirdest thing is that the USB "Safely remove USB Mass Storage Device" icon did show, except with no drive letter.

Anyway the way to deal with it was to fire up the Device Manager (Start->type in Device Manager) and double-click the external hard drive:

externalstorage_devmgr

Then go to the Volumes tab and click on Populate:

externalstorage_volumes

If the volumes show up, you're good to go.

Software
Thursday, February 21, 2008 3:55:13 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)  #    Comments [1]  |  Related posts:
Getting Google Chrome to behave
Finding the ultimate file synchronization tool
This is so damn cool
Delver in Israeli journalism
Delver launches!
Dealing with invalid permalinks
Thursday, February 21, 2008 8:16:36 PM (Jerusalem Standard Time, UTC+02:00)
What else can you do with a mass storage device, other than allocating it? gah!
Yoav F | yoav85 dot blogAT NOSPAMgmail dot com
Name
E-mail
Home page

Comment (Some html is allowed: a@href@title, b, blockquote@cite, em, i, strike, strong, sub, super, u) where the @ means "attribute." For example, you can use <a href="" title=""> or <blockquote cite="Scott">.  

Live Comment Preview