Trouble with Ultrabay 2000 slot and second hard-drive

[ProfKSergeev]

Hi! I'm new here and, of course, have a troubleshooting question. I've been running an IBM A22M (type 2628) with Windows 2000 Professional for several years and recently decided to purchase a few accessories, namely a docking station, Ultrabay 2000 second hard-drive adapter, and a Toshiba 40gb hard-drive. With the exception of the Toshiba hd, all of these accessories are refurbished and therefore do not come with manuals or drivers, etc. The docking station seems to be working fine; I can plug my laptop in and power it up through the station and connect devices through the station's ports.

The trouble arises when I try to get my laptop to recognise the second hd. I downloaded and installed the CMD Ultra DMA IDE driver (as found here: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... IGR-4K4PWW), and while the "Add New Hardware" wizard detects the Toshiba hd and claims it is working properly, I cannot access the drive elsewhere, such as in "My Computer." If anyone here could assist me in getting the second hdd in my Ultrabay 2000 slot to work, I would be eternally grateful.

Regards,

Lauren Oliver

[schen]

I actually have a couple of questions for you first.

* Has the toshiba been formated or is it in a "unpartitioned" state?
* Have you tried the Toshiba HDD in another situation such as: external enclosure, as primary HDD in a caddy etc.?
* Have you tried another disk in the Ultrabay adapter yet?

I think, the above info would give everybody a better baseline and help answer your question.

[ProfKSergeev]

Please keep in mind that I am almost completely computer illiterate, so I will do my best to answer your questions.

1. The Toshiba is not formatted or partitioned. I've done that to an external drive before (on an Apple G4), but am unsure as to how to go about it with a PC. And since I am planning on upgrading my OS to Windows XP in the coming days, I am not sure if I should format the drive now (with Win 2000) or wait until XP is installed.
2. I have not tried the Toshiba HDD in any of the ways you mentioned.
3. Unfortunately, I do not have another disk to try in the Ultrabay adapter. And one thing that concerns me is that the LED on the exterior of the adapter does not light up, unlike the LED on my CD-ROM, which glows whenever the computer is on.

I hope this clarifies my situation.

Lauren Oliver

[schen]

First of all, it's not a very good sign when the led on the adapter doesn't light up. In a general sense, there's very little to go wrong with the HDD adapters, so I'd generally guess that it's the HDD. At this point, there could be several things to think about (barring a defective drive). I can't remember whether it's the same for W2K, but on XP, you can right-click on "My Computer" and go down to the "Manage" selection. From there you can go down to the "Disk Management" under "Storage". Once there you should be able to see all drives that the computer sees (whether formated or not). If it's not partitioned and formatted, you can select that "Action" from the menu, then the drive should be accessible.

Otherwise, you'll have to go through a hardware trouble shooting procedure. You can do that by borrowing a drive "known good" to put in your adapter to see if there is an off chance that it's that. If that's good, then you'll have to try and figure out if the HDD is at fault. I have several same drives laying around here that have been detected and used in an Ultrabay adapter, so if you want to go that route, I'll be happy to send you one for test if you want to simply pay the actual postage.

[krazykritter]

Going for the simpliest solution here. Does the drive show up in Disk Management in Computer Management?

Right click My Computer and select Manage.

[lithium726]

The drive has not been intialized, there is no issue with the hardware.

go into the management console (as stated in the above post) right click on the HDD (should be the only one without allocated space) and tell it to intialize it. It will then show up in my computer, once you format a partition on it of course.

[underclocker]

If lithium726 is correct, which sounds quite possible, you won't be alone with this nailing you. Initialization has caught me more than once.

Similar to not having the Bluetooth adapter on and freaking out that it's not there and the card must be defective.

[smugiri]

The drive has not been intialized, there is no issue with the hardware.

go into the management console (as stated in the above post) right click on the HDD (should be the only one without allocated space) and tell it to intialize it. It will then show up in my computer, once you format a partition on it of course.

Just got caught by this same problem (initializing the drive) this last Tuesday.

I posted help for someone else in this thread on how to go about initializing. Its not that easy to explain to someone who has not done it before. There are a couple of links to screen shots to make things a little easier.