SimpleTech 250GB External Hard Drive Installation... (by 20 users)

i took my 250gb simpletech hardrive apart discconected the wires from the harddrive, re-hooked them, and it worked, hope this helps anyone who couldnt find another way

I bought the Simpletech Signature Mini 250GB last week and had these same issues. I wrote to the company's tech support and the solutions works. It boils down to you having to create a drive letter & partition for this. It took a little time to format, but it's all good now. I agree we shouldn't have such a headache for such a simple piece of hardware, though. I will cut/paste the info below. Once it was done, I was able to go to My Computer and see it listed as Drive H (which was what I selected).


PROBLEM: I have followed directions re: plugging device in, still cannot see device in MY COMPUTER. I have also tried plugging both USB's into computer to no avail. Even tried using it on my laptop, still not showing. My desktop is XP & loaptop is Vista. When I go to remove the dirve, it DOES show as Fujitsu, but I cannot acces the drive or locate it elsewhere. I really want to like this, but will have to return it if this issue is not resolvable.

SOLUTION: You might need to initialize the drive.

Right click on “My Computer” or “Computer” on Vista.
Select “Manage”
On the next screen select “Disk Management”
In the lower middle section you should be able to find your drive.
It will show up as Disk 1 or Disk 2….depending on how many drives you have in your computer.
If you click on the area that says Disk # you should get and option to “initialize drive”.
Also to the right it should show the allocation information for the drive. If it says “unallocated” then the drive needs to be partitioned.
Right click on the white box next to the drive listing.
Select the option “New Partition”
This will bring up the partition wizard and you will need to step through this process.
Select a primary partition.
On the next screen accept the maximum size it will provide.
On the next screen you assign a drive letter.
On the next screen you will do the format and accept the default settings.
The formatting will start and will be busy until it is complete.
You can monitor this from the disk management window.

Regards,

SimpleTech Technical Support

Hope it helps!

same problem on simple tech 250 gb ext hd. normally very reliable so i have 4 of these, (lots of foreign movie dls) after working with this off and on for months as a last attempt before writing off all this data as lost i took apart this drive and one just like it and swapped the interface cards. (what i call it) not the actual IDE cable connector card but the one that it plugs into. simple 4 torx head screws. put it all back together and hooked up, presto, worked perfectly. i right away transfered all 200 gb of data to another hd just in case. this was last ditch but it worked. maybe a design flaw in this model but i would still buy another simple tech storage device

One thing to remember is the some of the Simple drives requires the USB mini to conect to the drive and the TWO USB connects to be plugin to the computer.

You'd want to install the 'Installation and Driver disk' first before plug in the USB cable, normally.

I had the same problem when I bought a new laptop with Vista. I contacted SimpleTech but got no response to my issue.

I searched the internet and found some answers, but some were to take apart something and I did not think that was necessary. I also read one about security, but it gave information if the drive was on the network.

I thought the security thing sounded reasonable, since Vista had a lot of security enhancements so I put the hard drive on my old system. From Windows Explorer or My Computer I right mouse clicked on the drive and went to Properties. I then went to the Sharing Tab of properties and clicked the box to share the drive and clicked the box to allow all users to change files on the drive. I applied the changes, unplugged the drive from the old machine and plugged it into the USB of the Vista machine and presto chango it was recognized.

Hope this helps someone!

I tried to plug the thing into the USB hub and it wouldn't work. As soon as I plugged it into the USB port on the right side of my computer (I have a thinkpad), the SimpleTech Drive started right up.

JJ

thanks soo much i didnt even have this problem though. My problem was that i would power up and hav only the red light but never the blue one and would not show up. i tried what u did anyway and reset the thing inside and it works now even though i lost my casing but thats aprice im willing to pay instead of losing my thousands of music!!!!! :D :D:D:D

Yurb, thanks for the solution you've postedon 6/25 - we had the same issue, followed your advice on taking the case apart, and making sure that the USB was connected firmly to the disk. It worked!

above solution doesn't work, because the drive will not show up. If it did for you, your lucky.

THE SOLUTION: first off, simpletech drives are meant for macs, work has to be done to make it PC compatible. Tjhe soltuion I employed is I connected it to a Unix computer running ubuntu (ALTERNATIVELY, find a friend with a Mac and connect the drive). You'll see it will work, then from the non-PC computer reformat the drive to NTFS. Should work.


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