Windows sees ext HDD as removable disk asks me

[jamst149]

to insert disk!

I had bought this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822145113

and this

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817392009

Perhaps of note is that the HDD is OEM. I'm not really sure if that plays into any of the following.  The plan was to use acronis to clone the disk, swap the drives and voila, I've upgraded to a 160gb HDD.  I have a dell e1505 with an 80gb HDD, 1 gb RAM.

Installed HDD into enclosure per instructions and connected it to laptop. Heard that little sound that windows recognized new device. So I go to my computer and click on my new removable F: drive. It asks me to insert a disk. Huh? That can't be. Open up acronis backup software and it only recognizes my boot disk and will not allow me to add the disk as it won't recognize any available.

I go to my computer and right clicked, click manage. So I see the drive as the removable F: disk. There is nothing in the window to the right though, actually its totally grey.

So I call hitachi and they say the don't understand why its showing up as a removable disk and that I should try contacting the external manufacuter. So I call vantec and their tech guy says this is a known issue that is not specific to their drives. Says that sometimes xp recognizes external drive that use 2 usb's to connect (1 for power 1 for data) as a flash drive if you ahve previously used one, which I have.

Tells me to reseat the drive, this did nothing. Also told me to try and plug in the flash drive, change its drive name (changed it to G" , restart the pc and try pluggin in the external HDD. This also did nothing. That was all he offered.

He was saying its some sort of issue that xp has in recognizing the current attached device as a former attached device, is this possible? Is this common? What can I do to remedy? Is my only recourse to return this product and try another?

Thanks for any help, I'm at a bit of a dead end here in so far as troubleshooting this myself.

[ale52]

Never heard of this problem before, but if the manufacturer says it's a "known problem" then I'd advise returning the unit and getting something that will work.  I've hooked up several external devices to multiple computers and never had this problem.

Alan <><  

BTW - the links don't work  

[ntrealemail]

Your hyperlinks are dead but what it sounds like you bought was a hard drive and an external hard drive bay ?  lol i don't mean to laugh i just had the same problem before a few years ago and I felt pretty stupid after screwing with it for 20-30 min and calling a friend.  Format the hard drive.  Right now its just a blank drive.  Right click on My computer and click manage under the storage thing there is a disk management device from there you should be able to format it.