Hello there I am trying to access a TRANSCEND 250gb USB harddisk in Windows XP.I had installed RHEL 6 on my laptop and was not able to access the USB drive in Linux RHEL 6,I guess I dont remember I tried to mount it in Linux after installing ntfs-3g drivers in Linux ..I was able to mount and access all drive partitions of my laptop but not USB ...

I was able to access the contents in WINDOWS xp3 even though I wasn't able to access in RHEL 6 when I first connected it.

I tried to access the contents of this USB hdd using Ubuntu Live cd and I am able to access it ..but when I connect to Windows the ICON just doesn't show up ...please let me know the steps involved in making the USB disk recognized in WINDOWS XP SP3 and if possible RHEL 6.0

THANKS

Hi,

so in short you say: You've got as USB disk that is recognized by one system, and not by another?

Well, you may have picked one of these rare units that don't report themselves as a "USB Mass Storage Device" to the host, but instead as something special. A friend of mine recently had the same problem when he borrowed a USB HDD from me: It worked fine with my two Ubuntu PCs, but I knew I'd share it with friends occasionally, so I had formatted it with FAT32.

However, my friend told me that he'd tried to connect it to his Windows 7 PC, and nothing had happened. Then he tried an XP/SP2 machine, and at least the "New Hardware Detected" wizard popped up, and after a few seconds said: "The new hardware can now be used". However, there wasn't any new drive letter in Windows Explorer.

We investigated the problem together, and it turned out that the USB unit reported itself as "USB-SATA bridge" (and appeared as such in Device Manager). In other words: It claims it is a SATA controller, only that it's not connected to the PCI bus, but to USB. Windows 7 even denied its existence, and Windows XP failed to access it because we would've needed a driver for the SATA controller that was built into this enclosure.

Try to reconnect the device to your XP machine, and look for new items that appear in Device Manager. I guess you have something similar to what I had, for instance an "USB-SATA bridge" marked with an exclamation mark and reporting a missing driver. If that's what happens, I don't see any chance but contact the dealer or manufacturer where you got that drive.

[X] Doc CPU

Assign a drive letter to it. Use storage mmc part of computer management mmc in windows.

Hi there,

that won't work if the situation is what I guessed. At least it didn't work for me: The drive and the partition on it were displayed in diskmgmt.msc, but the option to assign a drive letter was grayed out in Win7 and XP. Only good old Win2k would let me do it.

[X] Doc CPU

As far as I know there is no way that windows will read a linux file system.

Hi there,

oh, so you may be surprised: Ext2IFS has been available for years and gives Windows full access to ext2 and ext3 file systems. I'm not sure, but there may be similar drivers for other file systems as well.

By the way, I don't think that an alien file system is the reason for the OP's problems. After all, he or she mentions using ntfs-3g, that's why I assume the drive in question is NTFS-formatted.

[X] Doc CPU

Hello DOCCPU,Larry Webb,Jefro ..thanks to all for the help regarding the issue I presented here...Well I had formatted the USB HDD with NTFS and was able to access in Windows XP3 ...I tried to mount it in RHEL6.1 and it was unsuccessful.I then tried to access the contents in Windows Xp which was again frustrating since there was no Icon shown up and no way to assign the driver letter ..etc...

Also tried to fix the MBR thinking it might do something.I my case MBR isn't needed because no OS is installed on this USB hdd..to be frank I don't have in depth knowledge about MBR and googling about it gave me this tool with fixing methods http://mbrwizard.com/examples.php ..I thougnt atleast I would be able to UNHIDE the partition using this tool,assign a drive letter and then access the contents ..but while doing this errors were thrown up ...I finally gave it up using UBUNTU live cd i copied all the contents to my friend's laptop then formatted(NTFS) this USB hdd with PARTITION MAGIC(because it was not shown in DISK MANAGEMENT in Windows XP)...

Copied back all the data back to my USB hdd and now I able to access it in UBUNTU LIVE and Win Xp....

So conclusion .... WINDOWS XP sucks !!!! ...thanks again for all your help ..but please let me know if you can help me mounting that USB hdd in RHEL6.1 and I have installed RHEL 6.i on EXT4FS formatted drive..thanks again

Using 'fdisk -l' command (without quotes) as root should give you a device no. to mount when usb device is plugged in.

OK, glad you got it fixed.

Not sure we know why or what happened.

I had similar issues years ago with a Maxtor one touch. Something would happen to it when used in Linux and then it would not be recognized through USB in Windows. To fix this, I would take the drive out of the enclosure and install it directly into a tower computer, then Windows would be able to see it. I'm not sure if I was running check disk in Windows, I don't think so, but basically just put it back in the enclosure and it would be recognized in Windows via USB. Till I would forget to remove it when rebooting to another OS from Linux as I have multi-boot systems, then it would disappear via USB again in both Linux and Windows. Repeat the process of removing it from the enclosure and plug it into the tower computer, boot up Windows, shutdown and put it back in the enclosure.
It had something to do with Linux and the enclosure, not the drive or the other operating systems, if I remembered to remove the drive before shutting down Linux, there was no issue, this basically happened when it was still plugged in and running when shutting down a Linux OS.

After some thought, I remembered how Windows would detect an issue with the drive during the boot process and would run checkdisk automatically before bringing up the desktop. So it seems Linux was not unmounting it properly during shutdown and would screwed up the file system. I had also bought another enclosure thinking that was the problem, same thing with the new enclosure. I still use these enclosures today, the problem does not exist anymore, probably because I use testing Linux OSs that get upgraded often.

Hello Jeffro it happened may be because RHEL6.1 may not support mounting of USB based HDD..i tried to mount it in RHEL 6.1 after installing the ntfs-3g drivers ...Before mounting in RHEL 6.1 I was able to access full content of HDD ...

So may be somewhere in RHEL 6.1 I need to do that tweak and as Larry Webb mentioned one can mount it in RHEL 6.1 after getting to know the HDD no using command "fdisk -l" ...I tried this after installing RHEL 6.1 & ntfs-3g ,but some error was encountered ..

anyways as Brains has mentioned about removing the case and then connecting to the Motherboard as a slave - I am afraid I can't do that since there is label on the disk that reads "WARRANTY VOID IF SEAL IS BROKEN" ...so I have to manage it and will keep looking for some solution ... thanks to all for the feedback ....I will get back with some solution ..can't give up will try my best