External Drive Problem

[Gary S.]

Hi:

I have done some searching with Google and in this group without luck
so far.

I have a laptop with XP Pro and a 20 gig Hard Drive and a DVD/CD
reader, and USB 1.1 ports. This is my first time with an OS newer than
Win98.

I have two different external boxes. One is a USB 1.1 CD-RW, the
Predator from Iomega. The other is a Firewire enclosure, into which I
can place either a faster CD-RW drive, or a large hard drive. I added
a Cardbus Firewire card.

I can read from any of these drives once installed. I can only
occasionally get the USB CD-RW to write, with no clear pattern. I have
never been able to write or format to the other CD-RW in the Firewire
box, and only been able to write small files to the HD in the Firewire
enclosure.

All of the hardware has worked attached to a desktop machine, and I
can read from every external drive I have tried, so I think this is
most likely a software issue. XP keeps telling me that the drivers are
up to date, but nothing is working the way it should for writing to an
external drive.

XP keeps telling me all is fine, and I have been diligent with
installing updates and Service Packs.

I do have the full Norton Suite, and had seen something that indicated
that could cause some troubles.

My life would be much simpler if I could offload files to either CD or
the extra hard drive, as I had originally intended.

Any thoughts, resources, solutions?

TIA,
Gary
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Gary D. Schwartz, Needham, MA, USA
Please reply to: garyDOTschwartzATpoboxDOTcom