"VanguardLH" wrote in message ...
Guv Bob wrote:

Buffalo 3T Ext Drive
Model HD-LC3.0U3
http://www.buffalotech.com/
(866) 752-6210

I bought one of these today. Practically no documentation.

I have Win2000 and the guy at the store said this one will work. The
drive shows up in Device Manager, but no new drive letter in Windows
Explorer.

Device Manager found the device via the USB interface. That only means
the device was detectable, not that it is usable.

Use Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) to see if any partitions are on the
drive. If not, you'll have to create one, or more. After creating or
finding the partitions, are they formatted? If not, you'll have to
format them.

http://www.buffalotech.com/content/f...HD-LCU3_DS.pdf
"Simply plug it in to any USB port and instantly expand storage ..."

Not if the hard disk has not been pre-partitioned and pre-formatted.

With so little documentation, and even if I were to guess how to get
this device working, I'll nuisance Buffalo with a phone call if anything
because the customer is nuisanced with no documentation and an external
device that was not pre-partitioned and pre-formatted. The call is free
to you (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_code_866).

They may figure someone might use this external storage on a *NIX host
and want to use ext3 instead of FAT32 or NTFS. Call them to find out.
Could be the device is defective. If so, you want to get this resolved
before the return period expires at the store where you bought it.

Thanks R & V.

I ended up killing the system by fooling around with Disk Management (not following your advice -- just my own "hey, let's try this" approach... LOL!!) I ended up marking a 2nd partition on the c: drive as "active" and could not boot again. Tried the 4 "boot" disks for Win2000 but they were worthless.

But today I was able to fumble thru this problem and got back to running again.

This is the rule I'll follow from now on.... Use only Western Digital and Seagate. They both have good documentation. Maxtor has been good for me too but I believe it was bought out by Seagate. Buffalo may be good hardware, but had a hard time find any useful technical info online.

Following is for any other poor sap who might have this same problem.

The summary is that it was mostly luck and trying one thing after another until something worked. Was a big waste of time trying to find out how to un-mark an "active" partition. Tons of searching and microsoft tips were all dead ends.

Problem solved by trial and error. I got a quick answer from Buffalo, but it was that this drive could not be used with Win2000. So I returned it and bought a WD 1TB internal drive. I opted to keep the existing cable and got a SATA to PATA backplane adapter that fit on the hard drive - $18 but much easier than the alternates.

Tried booting with the four Win2000 boot disks and never could get past the last menu. Repair & restore options didn't work fo rme. Also kept coming up with "corrupted files". (Turned out they weren't really corrupted.... figure that one out...)

Ended up getting access via an old Norton Windows 95 emergency disk. I couldn't really do anything with it, but it did get enough access to see that all the c: drive files were still there.

End of day 2.

Next day, I removed the jumper on the old c: drive to make it a slave, restarted, hit DELETE to BIOS settings, and set the new drive to Master and old one to slave. My plan was to install Win2000 on the new drive and then copy all the files from the old c: drive.

Then, surprise surprise, It came up to the bootstrap menu. I selected Safe mode and checked everything out. Looking at Disk Mgmt again, I could see that Win2000 in the old c: drive was running the system, and that the 2nd "active" mark had been removed.

Once I was convinced all was OK, I rebooted and it started up normally.

Good for another 12,000 miles.

Next project is to installed Windows 7 so I can dual boot and starting getting up to speed. I have heard mixed comments about Win 8 and 8.1, and just good things about 7, so I'll stick with that one next.

One thing I don't understand -- why so all the internal drives still work with Win2000 with no trouble and all the external drives are XP and later?