How to troubleshoot a USB hard drive - Everything USB Community

How to troubleshoot a USB hard drive

We must be clear here that we are not talking about flash or "finger" USB drives here. We are discussing the good, old-fashioned spinning hard disk drives. These would include some MP3 players like the iPod and other "full-sized" players.

The first thing to note when trying to fix a USB hard drive is whether it was pre-assembled or if you/a friend assembled it. Pre-assembled drives are generally less troublesome. If they do not work, these are the reasons, generally:

- A defective or damaged drive/cable.
- A problematic PC or Windows installation.
- A PC that doesn't meet the minimum system requirements of the drive
- Check BIOS support and update, check Windows version.
- Windows hasn't assigned a letter to the drive.
- The drive doesn't get sufficient power
- all drives should have an AC power supply. Power supplements from the PC or laptop are rarely sufficient.

When discussing home-built drives, we must add a problem or two to the above list:

- The drive used was not jumpered properly.
- Pins were bent during the assembly the drive.
- The drive was not formatted from the factory and requires partitioning and formatting.

Details

- The most common problem is the lack of proper formatting. In Windows 2000 and XP, there is a utility called Disk Management (DISKMGMT.MSC). It's in Administrative Tools > Computer Management. The drive should appear there. If it does, right-click the drive and select New Partition. The rest comes easily. When done, the drive should be formatted and assigned a letter. If a letter is not assigned, right-click and assign a letter. If the drive doesn't appear in Disk Management, there is another problem somewhere.

We should note here that, many times, the drive only needs a letter assigned. Do so with Disk Management.

In Windows 98/ME, the user can click Start > Run > Command > OK and then type FDISK in the DOS Window to partition and format the drive. Most times, the manufacturer includes a utility and instructions for formatting the drive.

- The third most common issue is mis-jumpering the assembled drive. Western Digital and IBM/Hitachi have specific jumper settings for situations where the drive is not paired with a slave drive. This is such a case. Refer to this link.

The best practice is to just use Cable Select on all USB drives.

- Next is insufficient power. Most 3.5? drives come with AC adapters and these are rarely a problem. Unfortunately, 2.5" notebook-sized USB drives usually lack an AC adapter and are a huge problem. We have yet to see a USB disk drive that gets it's power from PC or laptop and works with any consistency. Always seek a product which has it?s own power source.

- Always check all cables. In the case of assembled drives, disassemble and double-check the cable connection and the pin conditions.

If the preceding points did not help you to get your USB disk drive working, please feel free to post a question - we will do our best to help.

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[size=1]William DeVercelly

Windows 2000 MCSE/MCP/MVP and USB Retail Specialist/Troubleshooter[/size]

[color=blue][size=2][b]Please do not use Private Messaging to ask technical questions. Keep it out in the open.[/b][/size][/color]

[size=1]Please update your virus protection, visit Windows Update and beware that overclocking your CPU can cause odd USB behavior.[/size]