On 8/4/2014 4:35 AM, R.Wieser wrote:
Hey Guv Bob,

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?

I would not know. Thats because I've got at least two USB drives (the
real ones, not thumbdrives) that have no problem running on W98se
(and I therefore assume would also work under W2000).

Though I must confess that I've installed a generic USB driver
program, by which feat I do not need to find special W98se compatible
drivers for mass-storage drives anymore.

Regards, Rudy Wieser

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?


I have discovered that inside the windows registry file are references
to the drives allowed in the USB ports, a cleaning out of that info has
in the past allowed drives to 'wake-up' and be useful once again