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Sager 4780 - External Hard Drive Problem

post #1 of 10
10/8/05 at 10:11am
Thread Starter 
Hi Everyone,
I'm having a little bit of a problem. I bought a 120GB Maxtor hard drive (internal). I put it in my desktop, formated it, works great, about 112GB usable. I took it out, put it in an external enclosure, figure I'd make it portable. I hook it up to my 4780, all I see is 33GB. I've been to all the hard drive forums, I tried formatting it with MaxBlast 4. I've tried it under different jumper setting, (Master, Slave, Cable Select, etc.). I updated my bios to the latest. Almost had a heart attack when I couldn't get the function or control keys to work. Fixed that problem though. Whew! I contacted tech support, they told me my laptop probably doesn't support 120GB hard drives. Just wondering, how is it I have an 80GB installed, internally? If anyone could help out on this problem I would appreciate it.

Specs:
Windows XP Home, 2.8 GHz P4, 17" Wide, 1GB RAM, 80GB HD, ATI Radeon 9600 128mb.

Thank you!
Cyatic
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post #2 of 10
10/8/05 at 1:08pm
I think that the external enclosure electonics don't support anything above 33GB. A lot of the older/cheaper ones had that limitation.
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post #3 of 10
10/8/05 at 1:53pm
Thread Starter 
So, do you think if I bought an external (say 120gb) hard drive it would probably work?
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post #4 of 10
10/8/05 at 1:55pm
Thread Starter 
Sorry, I just checked the box , it says it supports up to 200 GB. Now I'm really stumped.
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post #5 of 10
10/8/05 at 5:06pm
Repartition and reformat the drive while it is in the external incluosure and see what happens.
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post #6 of 10
10/8/05 at 10:33pm
Thread Starter 
Tried that. All MaxBlast sees is 33GB. I tried reformatting it in Windows XP, same thing. I even tried partition magic. All they see is 33GB. This is definetly a tough one. I tried to call Maxtor and they wouldn't help because they say they one give tech support for Internal Hard Drives that are actually in a desktop computer. They don't support external enclosures.
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post #7 of 10
10/8/05 at 11:30pm
what brand external? maybe they can help ya..i would if i knew more.
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post #8 of 10
10/9/05 at 10:23am
Did you install the drivers that came w/ the external case? Some cases you can get away w/o the drivers while others are fussy about that sort of thing. This sounds like it might be one of those cases where it's like G said- it won't support 33gb+ unless it's taught how to (ie- install da drivers).

Just a thought. If that doesn't work... ?
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post #9 of 10
10/9/05 at 9:07pm
Thread Starter 
Well,
The brand is FMI, it's a CompUSA brand. The SKU is 306103. Here's the link:

http://www.compusa.com/products/prod...06103&pfp=cat3

The enclosure didn't come with drivers. Actually it only came for drivers for windows 98.
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post #10 of 10
10/9/05 at 9:47pm
You will need to:

1). Insure that the jumper is set to Master.

2). Delete any partition that was previously established on the HDD when you used it in your computer. The follow the instructions for initializting the drive and formatting it.

Also make sure that you have the lastest service packs for Windowsnstalled.
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