External Hard Drive Help!!!

Michelle Davies · Dec 25, 2006

I received a new Western Digital Premium hard drive for Christmas. It loaded just fine, I downloade my pics to it but now I can't pull them up from it. I thought that this was a way to store photos and still access them to free up the computer? Does anyone out there know what to do with this? Thanks!

jwkwd · Dec 25, 2006

I don't know if I can be that much help. I got an external hard drive a little bit ago, and although it hooked up OK, I still had to format it first, partition, and assign it drive letters.

John_05 · Dec 25, 2006

Michelle Davies said:
I received a new Western Digital Premium hard drive for Christmas. It loaded just fine, I downloade my pics to it but now I can't pull them up from it. I thought that this was a way to store photos and still access them to free up the computer? Does anyone out there know what to do with this? Thanks!

i have 2 different Western Digital externals, and havent had a problem with either.

when you buy them, they are formatted in FAT32. when i got mine, i reformatted them to NTFS. as for assigning a drive letter, Windows should do that automatically. you would only need tt do that if you wanted to assign it a different letter.

to access the drive, all you should have to do is make sure te drive is on and connected, open My Computer, and then find the drive in the list and double click it.

what happens when you try to access your files on the drive? a more in-depth description of what is happening will help someone help you fix it.

Jeff Canes · Dec 25, 2006

Mine need to been turned on after booting up the computer are it does not see them, also look in to the properties permissions

Point-N-Shoot · Dec 26, 2006

John is correct...Windows will auto-assign a letter to the drive. Can you see the drive (letter) in "My Computer"? If so, can you access ANYTHING on the drive? Some externals are "Plug N Play", others require drivers to be installed before they will communicate with your computer.

I have Maxtor One Touch drives and they required me to initially run a setup disc to use them...but it auto installs, and then I just connected the firewire and...voilla'.

You claim you "downloaded" photos to the drive...how exactly? Are you using a third-party software program to transfer files, or just dragging and dropping within Windows? Elaborate please.

If you're still having trouble, go here...

http://support.wdc.com/

I would imagine a solid company like WD to have excellent customer support.

Point-N-Shoot · Dec 26, 2006

John_05 said:
when you buy them, they are formatted in FAT32. when i got mine, i reformatted them to NTFS.

That could be the problem...however, for all we know she could still be using Windows ME and her existing files are in FAT32 format. Personally, I prefer to stay with the latest technology...I use a Commodore 64.

Alex_B · Dec 26, 2006

Michelle Davies said:
I received a new Western Digital Premium hard drive for Christmas. It loaded just fine, I downloade my pics to it but now I can't pull them up from it. I thought that this was a way to store photos and still access them to free up the computer? Does anyone out there know what to do with this? Thanks!

so does it mean you were able to store your images on that drive when you first used it? and now you cannot access them anymore?

did i get that right?

so if it worked once, then it is formatted correctly and it works in general.

either there is something wrong with the drive now, or with its power supply. you did switch it on, did you? (sorry to ask, but we all do forget stupid things sometimes

).

if it did work once it should work the second time you try to use it. if it does not, something has been damaged I'd guess.

Michelle Davies · Dec 26, 2006

ok, I am running windows xp, and when I look at what the photos are formatted as they are NTFS. my other files drives are FAT and FAT32. I used the program that came with the hard drive...downloaded with that...it says it was successful but if I go into PSCS2 it tells me that I cannot pull anything up from it because it is not a recognizeable format. I can however, manually put files into the drive and pull them. Is that what I am supposed to do? It doesn't seem like that would be the whole point of a hard drive...any more help is appreciated!

Alex_B · Dec 26, 2006

xp should be able to access both ntfs and fat and fat32

i myself use various filesystems on various drives, and neither xp itself, nor pscs2 ever had a problem with it. i can access all my external drives using pscs2 .... your problem seems to be something very fishy ... i am afraid i am not a windows expert...

guitarkid · Dec 27, 2006

Do this:

is there or is there NOT a drive letter when you click on MY COMPUTER? if there is NOT, then you need to do THIS......

right click on the MY COMPUTER icon and click on MANAGE.
double click on disk management
right click on the newer drive area in the lower section and select FORMAT.
format with NTFS.

you may also need to right click on it and select MARK PARTITION AS ACITVE. this is so windows XP can see it.

this should fix that.

good luck.
steve

Michelle Davies · Dec 27, 2006

there is a letter drive. it is formatted as NTFS. however, i cannot pull up any files that i have "saved" to the external drive. i can copy files to this drive but not pull up from the actual hard drive. is this what is supposed to be going on? does the extra drive not use memory from the computer? i thought the whole point of the external hard drive was that you put things on them and then pulled from it so that your actual hard drive was freed up. ????? i am about ready to send this sucker back.

Alex_B · Dec 27, 2006

Michelle Davies said:
is this what is supposed to be going on?

definitely not!

the external drive should behave just like any internal drive ... the only difference should be the letter assigned to the drive ...

if anything else behaves differently, then something is wrong.

guitarkid · Dec 27, 2006

well that's no good. can you SEE the files on the hard drive? what happens when you double click on MY COMPUTER and then double click on the DRIVE LETTER of the external drive? do you actually SEE the files but can't work with them? or do you get an error message after clicking on the drive letter for the drive, and if so, what does it say? i can try and work with you on this...don't get frustrated. this is what i do for a living. could be the drive but i can walk you through stuff.
steve

Michelle Davies · Dec 28, 2006

ok when I click on My Computer and pull up the drive I get the files. If I click on the files they open and show several individual files. HOWEVER, when I click on the files that shows the Photoshop icon I get the file opening the actual Photoshop program and then it tells me that I am trying to open an unsupported file. The other files get a error message with ArcNB1.NBZ Thanks for helping!
Michelle

woodsac · Dec 28, 2006

If you are using the supplied software, it is probably compressing the files and storing them for a recovery process. Those files can only be opened by recovery or startup software.

Try to simply drag and drop a file onto the new hard drive and then see if you can read it.