Passport 2.5 drive won't install

[lodidad]

The passport drive I purchased to use as an external drive for backups is not
recognized by my computer. When I plug it in nothing happens although I was
able to format the drive into 4 NTFS partitions in Disk Management. It is
listed in Disk Management as disk 2 (I have two internal hard drives) and it
shows up in Device Manager as "USB Mass Storage Device" but it is not listed
in "My Computer" nor is it listed in Windows Explorer so there is no way I
can write to it. Western Digital suggested that there might not be enough
power going to the USB ports on my computer to run the drive so I puchased a
power booster cable which permits one to plug into two USB ports with the
same cable. As the USB ports on my Dell Dimension 4400 are either 1.0 or 1.1,
I also purchased a PCI card with USB 2.0 ports and used them but no success
there either. When I plugged the drive into my neighbor's computer it worked
fine, so the cables and the drive are OK. Any suggestions?

 

[lodidad]

This forum is a major disappointment. No response to my question in two weeks.

Fortunately, I didn't limit my search for an answer to just this forum. I
received many responses and two solutions from a couple of other forums. As a
courtesy, I am posting the solutions so anyone who might be interested can
expand their knowledge base.

#1 I have Tweak UI installed on my system and after one suggestion I
received, I checked "drives" under My Computer (in Tweak UI) and found drive
J (my Passport drive) listed without a question mark on it, but the box next
to it was not checked. When I checked the box, I immediately had access to my
new Passport drive. One quick & simple solution.

#2 The other solution was a bit more complex but equally effective. This is
what I received from another forum participant:

"I had the same problem and it was solved in a slightly detailed way.
But first do the following:
With the computer turned on, insert a USB flash drive and see if it is
recognized in 'My Computer'. If not continue below:

Do the registry keys
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Explorer
or
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\
Explorer
contain an entry 'NoDrives' that's either called ReG_Binary or REG_DWORD
with a Non-Zero digital word like, for example, 02 ff ff 03?
If it does change the binary word to 00 00 00 00 and save and reboot.
The idea is that 00 00 00 00 unmasks all new drives and it should then be
recognized by 'My Computer'
Hopefully this will work for you."

This solution did work, but I suppose it's always better if you don't have
to mess around with the registry

"lodidad" wrote:

> The passport drive I purchased to use as an external drive for backups is not
> recognized by my computer. When I plug it in nothing happens although I was
> able to format the drive into 4 NTFS partitions in Disk Management. It is
> listed in Disk Management as disk 2 (I have two internal hard drives) and it
> shows up in Device Manager as "USB Mass Storage Device" but it is not listed
> in "My Computer" nor is it listed in Windows Explorer so there is no way I
> can write to it. Western Digital suggested that there might not be enough
> power going to the USB ports on my computer to run the drive so I puchased a
> power booster cable which permits one to plug into two USB ports with the
> same cable. As the USB ports on my Dell Dimension 4400 are either 1.0 or 1.1,
> I also purchased a PCI card with USB 2.0 ports and used them but no success
> there either. When I plugged the drive into my neighbor's computer it worked
> fine, so the cables and the drive are OK. Any suggestions?