I have a Western Digital 40GB external firewire hard drive. It works
fine with my desktop firewire card and Win98.
Connecting it to my Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop firewire port does
not work. It shows up in the device manager as "functioning normally"
but it does not show up in "my computer". The "my computer" window
cycles through "running" and "not responding" and the red
access-indicator LED on the drive flickers periodically but even after
30 minutes of that the drive does not register.
Scanning the web, it seems that there might be a XP problem with
external firewire and USB2 drives - but I did not find a solution.
Thanks for any help

---

Clarification of Question by nielsck-ga on 29 Mar 2004 08:31 PST

The laptop runs WinXP Home

---

Clarification of Question by nielsck-ga on 31 Mar 2004 09:59 PST

Thanks hipek and fivealarm, 
I must have spent 6-8 hours over the last 2 days tinkering (removing
the USB and 1394 controllers, trying to access the drive in "disk
management" going in and out of safe mode)...
to no avail. 
If I remove the controllers and reboot the system will come up with
the message "found new hardware": and then proceed to re-install - and
then I have the same problems as before.
In the Disk-management the drive does not show up consistently - and
it does not let me do any changes.
.....

---

Clarification of Question by nielsck-ga on 02 Apr 2004 01:59 PST

Finally, with patience ....
here is what finally worked:  after removing the controllers and
having them auto-re-install, and then again opening the
Computer-Management => Disk-Management, I decided to just walk away
for several hours and have the computer sit on its
?computer-management not responding?. Since the access-light on the
drive was occasionally blinking, I thought that maybe something is
still going on.
Returning after 2 hours the drive had indeed mysteriously appeared in
disk management and it allowed me to re-format it ? and voila ? all is
well.
So, I figure it was the previous formatting on a Win98 system that
made this drive difficult to recognize by XP and the attempts by the
system to recognize it is what slowed everything down to the degree
that the tasks were ?not responding? when viewed in the task manager.

Thanks to everyone ? I should have just been more patient....

Try this:
Open up Control Panel, double click on Administrative Tools, and then
Computer Management. On the left panel look for "Storage"; look in
there for "Disk Management" - click on that and the program will list
all hard drives, optical drives and removable storage drives. It will
also show any external hard drives you have connected. You will need
to format the disk before it can show up in "My Computer".

Ironically I also setup a 40 gig external firewire hard drive for my
Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop. I have Windows XP Professional.

Hope this helps.

Unplug the hard drive from the firewire. Boot into safe mode by
pressing f8 while boot Windows logo is up.

Then go into device manager by going to control panel - System - Click
on Hardware tab and Device Manager.  Expand Universal serial Bus
Controller and remove all the entries.  Do the same for 1394 Bus
Controller.

Reboot. goto normal mode.

Then plug in the hard drive into the firewire.  It should now show its
installing and show up as a drive letter.

You may need to reboot once more before it will work.