Portable HDD enclosure won't install

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Kymber

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Nov 17, 2015
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I have a Gigaware USB HDD portable enclosure which, while detected by Windows, will not install. Windows says it cannot find the driver, which should be the same USBSTOR.SYS which my other external hard drives use.
Of course, since Gigaware was a Radio Shack company, there is no way to get any kind of technical support from them for this (not that I have any feeling that there was a special driver for this enclosure).
The drive is a small (20GB) drive from an old laptop which is being scrapped. It will power up and spin when the enclosure is connected via USB to my desktop machine ... but I can't access it because the enclosure won't install.
I have checked all of my other external drives and all of them are still recognized and assigned a drive letter in Windows when plugged in. All of them use the USBSTOR.SYS driver that is already in the WINDOWS/SYSTEM32/DRIVERS folder, so I doubt it is a corrupted driver file.
Would anyone have any thoughts of anything else I can try?
 
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That would be the first time I ever heard of a motherboard's driver being needed to install a USB external HDD, but the motherboard is for a Dell Optiplex 170L if you really think that has anything to do with it.



 
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Okay, First take out the drives and put the different OS. and format it as NTFS.
After that, plug in again ur system and try it again.
If it doesn't work, use the link and download serial ata driver and extract it from zip. Put it to any usb drive and show it during windows installation as hard drive driver.

It should be fine. let me know the result.
 
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If that was supposed to make sense, it didn't.



 
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Hi there Kymber,

Is the drive recognized by Disk Management and Device Manager and how?
Most probably, there is something wrong with the enclosure. The driver should install automatically.
Things you can try:
- Use a different USB cable.
- Try the drive on another system in order to be sure whether it is a driver related issue or the enclosure is faulty.

Cheers,
D_Know_WD
 
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Well, you and I agree that the driver should install automatically. :sarcastic:

Since the Hardware Wizard fails to install the drive, I am not surprised to find that it is not listed as an active drive in Disk Management. It does appear in Device Manager with the infamous "yellow question mark of doom" but as a Mass Storage Device under Disk Drives, rather than as a "USB Mass Storage Device" under Universal Serial Bus. As all the rest of my portable HDD enclosures appear under USB, this would seem to me an indication that USBSTOR.SYS isn't even being considered by the Hardware Wizard, but I don't know how to force it.

Trying to manually point the Wizard at the right location doesn't work either. I try pointing it at the driver, and it wants an .INF file; I point it at the folder with USBSTOR.INF and it says that doesn't have the information for my device. And the Wizard does not even give me Universal Serial Bus as an option when I ask it to show me all devices, either.

I suppose this is what I get for buying a Radio Shack remnant.



 
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