[OldLadyWho]

I don't even know where to begin.

Over the last two months I have purchased 2 hard drives and three external enclosures, in hopes of having some nice backup storage for my family's home computers. I've failed miserably, so far. Before I take anything back to the store, I thought I'd check in and see if anyone knew of a solution...

Here is the problem: For my first attempt, I purchased from New Egg a 3.5" Seagate 320GB, SATA hard drive, and a Venus DS3 aluminum hard drive enclosure to put the Seagate into.

The enclosure (on the box) states that it "supports" drives up to 750GB, and the list on the box also includes SATA to USB (which is what I want, I think)

But when I opened the Venus enclosure, it had NO connectors that matched ANYthing on the hard drive itself. I can find no way to use the Seagate drive in that enclosure.

I tried it again, this time took a trip to Fry's Electronics and actually asked for help (And yes, I should know better). We read the packages and the NEW enclosure does say that it "supports" SATA. I was so happy, and they had such good prices on hard drives I even bought a 500GB Seagate, and two enclosures. I figured I'd send the New Egg enclosure to my son to use. Plus, I'd have two nice backup drives that should accomodate everyone's backups.

I brought it all home and opened the new enclosures up, and still can find NO way to plug anything in. Nor does there seem to be room inside the enclosure for any sort of adaptor...if there IS any sort of adaptor available for it.

Which brings me to my question. IS there a way to make these hard drives and enclosures work? Is there something (some special verbage) that I should look for to find an enclosure that truly DOES support SATA drives? Or should I just go get my money back and give it up as a lost cause (please note that I'm not a good giver-upper, I'd much rather work at a solution, if one is possible )

OLW

 

[Triple6]

Could you post the exact models of the hard drives you have and the enclosures you have. If it says it supports SATA drives then it should. What plugs do the drives & enclosures have that the other does not?

 

[jonuck]

Hi OldLadyWho,
I can sympathise with your frustration ......... you are not the first rant about apparent ease of intergration of HDD to enclosure. I have just purchased a Seagate Barracuda 320gb Sata2 HDD and a Vantec Nexstar 3 3.5 Sata HDD enclosure and I can only say that this duo was a delight to assemble ....... the Vantec comes complete with all possible config arrangments and is able to allow esata interface up to 3gb .... it cost a little more than your average enclosure but the extra is well worth it ........ dont give up on this .. there is enough expertise on this forum to see you successfuly configured.

jonuck,

 

[winbob]

Poking around on the net for "Venus DS3" shows that they come as SATA and PATA under the same "DS3" designation

Perhaps the plant had a bad day in the packaging dept and put some PATA carriers in SATA boxes You should be able to recognize the old PATA connector. Here's a picture of the DS3 unit with the WRONG connector:

http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/storage/Venus_DS3_Enclosure_3.html

I would go back to Fry's with their unit, and your Drive and show them the problem.

 

[OldLadyWho]

Oh...I don't even want to tell you what I just realized (because it's really a dimwitted mistake). While writing up the particulars of both hard drives and enclosures in answer to your post, and reading ALL of the information on the boxes, I realized that even tho the enclosures have SATA compatibility listed, only ONE item on the lists have a little blue bullet next to it. It is apparently the one that pertains to the enclosures I bought. That blue bulletted items says: "Supports USB 2.0".

Further down the list are the SATA compatible models...none of which have a little blue bullet next to them, nor are they my models. (It's ok to laugh)

The othe hard drive is an Ultra ATA (Seagate Barracuda 500GB), and it fits the enclosure just fine, in fact I have been putting it all together since I last posted.

So, I'm going to go stand in the corner now and recite the words "I will not post a problem on TSG until I have read ALL the information on the box" at least a hundred times.

I thank you very kindly for taking the time to help me. Actually, it was the process of answering your post that made me slow down and read it all more carefully, so you did help a lot.

Thanks again,
OLW

 

[JohnWill]

Is the offer to shoot you still open?

 

[OldLadyWho]

Thanks for all the feedback. It's true that the compatibility between HDD and enclosures is not exactly easy to discern on many of the packages.

I've assembled the 500GB Seagate Ultra ATA drive into the Venus DS3 external enclosure. This enclosure states that it supports up to 750GB drives.

The newly assembled external drive is now plugged into the new laptop with WindowsXP Home Edition, SP2.

The first time I booted the laptop (with the new external drive plugged in and turned on), Windows acknowledged finding the new drive (mostly it called it a new USB mass storage device), but it did not show up in the list of hard drives in "My Computer".

I opened the disk manager to see if it showed the drive there. It did. It also correctly showed the capacity (475GB), but it also labeled it as uninitialized, and in the right-click menu there was no option to initialize, the "format" was greyed out, also no option to partition the drive. (By the way, I am new to XP, my old computers have win2k and Ubuntu. I'm having a little trouble warming up to XP)

I decided to do a restart, just to see if things would work after that. But after the restart the new external drive didn't show up in the drive list, nor was it in the disk managment list anymore. Now I haven't a clue what to do.

I may try using Knoppix to see if I can at least access the drive and partition it.

If anyone's still hangin' around that might give me pointers toward getting Windows to accept that new external storage drive, it would be appreciated.

Would it be easier to just pull that drive out of the enclosure and hook it up to my old Win2k machine and do the partitioning and formatting there, first? To be honest, I don't know if my old win2k machine can even recognize a 500GB drive.

I think I'll try Knoppix first...will post back with results.
OLW

 

[OldLadyWho]

"Is the offer to shoot you still open?"
=====================

lol! Absolutely. My grandson does it all the time with that blankety-blank water cannon of his. I can take it.

 

[stantley]

Right click where it shows on the screen shot, partition (1 partition is fine) and then format. The format will take a long time.

 

[OldLadyWho]

I tried doing that. All options in the right-click menu were grayed-out, not available. The drive was labeled "uninitialized", no options were available for it.

So, I restarted the laptop. After WinXp booted up, the new external drive still did not show in the "My Computer" drive list, and it no longer showed at all in the disk managment window.

I tried Knoppix. It also did not "see" the new drive. Just to test it, I plugged in another external USB drive, Knoppix recognized it immediately. I have taken the new drive back out of its enclosure and am getting ready to shut my old Win2k computer down to plug it in there. I doubt if Win2k can read such a large drive, but I'd like to see if it even finds it at all. If the drive without the enclosure is found, then it might be something on the enclosure that I haven't connected correctly (though it didn't seem too complicated).

I'll let you know if my computer can find the drive. Maybe I can partition it from there and make sure it's formatted and active before I put it back into the enclosure.

 

[JohnWill]

Unplug the drive and boot the system up. Plug the drive in after the system is fully booted, then go back to Disk Management.

Right click on the left where the drive is listed, that's where the initialize option shows up.

 

[OldLadyWho]

Hi JohnWill,

Thank you for that tip.

Thinking back to the second time I did the restart I did have the external drive plugged-in and turned on. When the drive no longer showed up anywhere at all after that restart, I didn't think to try it again with the drive turned off. I did plug it into the old Ubuntu machine, and it didn't aknowledg the drive at all.

At that point I pulled the drive from the enclosure, and plugged it into the Win2K computer, which also didn't see the drive.

Finally I rebooted that computer using a "gparted" Live CD, and partitioned and formatted the drive from there. It worked like a charm. This morning I put the drive back into the enclosure and connected it back to the laptop. The laptop "saw" the new external drive immediately, without a restart.

This was the first time I'd ever used the gparted Live CD. It blew me away, what an elegant little tool! http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Now I just need to get the correct enclosure for the other new drive (the SATA one) and I'll be set. When it's time to plug that one in, I'll remember your tip to leave it turned off until after the computer boots up. Seems like I'm always doing things the hard way...at least I got to learn how to use the Live partitioning program, so that was fun.

Thanks so much for helping!!
OLW

 

[JohnWill]

Glad you got it all going. Consider yourself shot!

You can mark your own threads solved using the thread tools at the upper right of the screen.

 

[Compiler]

And no need for you to feel foolish. Yes, drive boxes & drives are usually very easy to install - and I LOVE the Vantec designs over anything else. But otherwise - those dots or notes have gotten the best of us.

I was buying a DVD burner for a client... I got up to the register and finally noticed the DOT that the drive was beige... not BLACK as shown on the box.... long walk back ;(