Wednesday, June 02, 2010

Length isn't everything

So before you format that hard drive ...

Boned Jello

This is pretty interesting low-tech solution to what seemed a high tech problem.

 I bought a Western Digital External 500 GB Passport Hard Drive from Woot, and it came formatted  FAT 32.  After several false starts I was able to reformat it to NTFS.  Then, of a sudden, it began a rapid on/off sequence that made it impossible to use.  I hooked it up to my ACER notebook where it ran perfectly.  I was saying bad words, but eventually found this:

“ Dumb asses at WD sent a a cord that was too long. Before you start your tech war. I used the 6" USB 2.0 cable that came with my Portable USB HDD. And what do you know the dumb thing started working fine. So before you format that hard drive try a shorter USB cable. It has to do with voltage drop recived to and from the port. Ask some one who can explain it. I just know how to fix it.! Good luck ”

Now, I have to figure out why my NTFS drive now shows a RAW format.  I'm guessing that I didn't mount it properly, and am hoping someone out there can save me more time by 'splaining what to do?

6/02/2010 02:48:00 PM 13 Comments

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13 comments:

BlogDog said...

There are definitely power issues in USB cables. I have 320GB WD portable and my old G5 iMac (don't start!) didn't put enough juice down the line to power it. But my new Intel iMac whirls it up just fine.
Terabyte drives are in the $100 range now. Freakin' incredible. I remember 400K one-sided hard shell micro floppies. Yeah. I'm old.

6/2/10, 4:00 PM
Anonymous said...

rewarI remember when a 20K hard drive was HUGE! And my first 28K modem. Ah, memories.
Tim

6/2/10, 4:48 PM
El Jefe said...

Rodge,

IF you don't have any data on it then:

(For this let's say your drive letter is 'G')

1. Open a command prompt
2. convert G: /fs:ntfs

If you DO have data you need then check out this site:

Partition Recovery

6/2/10, 5:41 PM
Rodger the Real King of France said...

I remember trudging up the steps at 28th St. Photo in Manhattan to buy a 14.4 modem so I could send the mother ship files on my Apple I to their PC. It was gawd awful to configure using a BB, and no menu, just gobbeldy-gook computer commands. It took overnight to send the Apple inventory spreadsheet. What the he;; was the name of the word processor everyone used that also required DOS commands to even place a comma?

6/2/10, 5:52 PM
DougM said...

BlogDog,
Hey, those still work on my '84 128K Mac.
I even have a scanner for it. Yeah, it mounts on the head of the dot-matrix printer in place of the ribbon cartridge.
(What? Oh, yeah, it sucks, definitely sucks, definitely...)

6/2/10, 6:08 PM
TheOldMan said...

Paper tape on a 110 baud teletype.

6/2/10, 7:06 PM
Anonymous said...

Rodger, my first word processor was Xerox 860. USN Training Command. I dont remember what you describe. I DO remember 10 inch floppies. I know, no penis size jokes.
Tim

6/2/10, 7:34 PM
David said...

Years ago we got two new 286 clones in our office. My program manager fought for a couple days over who got the one with the 5 MB hard drive and who got the one with the 10 MB drive. I finally won because I was doing some CAD work and needed the extra space. Three years later when we up graded I still had 7 MB available on my drive and he still had 3 on his.

6/2/10, 8:22 PM
Rodger the Real King of France said...

Jefe - I already did reformat from FAT 32 to NTFS. Took about two hours, and finished successfully. Today it switched to RAW, which I think is what is listed if the actual format isn't recognized???

6/2/10, 8:41 PM
Anonymous said...

Mine did the RAW thing too. Open up the command prompt (from start>run, type in CMD) that'll open a DOS window.
(NOTE:My wd drive is recognized as H so I'll provide the commandline based off of that.)
from within the DOS window type in the following:
chkdsk h: /f /r

the /f fixes any errors and the /r recovers readable info

6/2/10, 9:37 PM
El Jefe said...

Rodge,

Like my dad always told me:

"Son, you get what you paid for."

6/2/10, 10:44 PM
Alan J. said...

"What the he;; was the name of the word processor everyone used that also required DOS commands to even place a comma?"

You're probably thinking of the old WordStar program that we had back in the 80's, Roger. Wow, you're actually making me glad for having MS now.

6/2/10, 11:23 PM
Rodger the Real King of France said...

Anonymous: I had already run chkdsk /f, but without the /r device (which took forever to finish), but it did work. Here's the strange part - even before chkdsk began this.


Alan J: Yes, Wordstar! It was faster to chisel in granite. Thanx

6/3/10, 11:20 AM

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