Problem open or Expolre my hard drive in windows xp

You can check to see if the hard drive is dislodged, but other than that I don't know what to tell you. If you know the drive is functioning correctly then your motherboard is probably dead.

I found that often, external hard drives just don't have any active partitions and thus don't show up in Windows. Go into the control panel, administrative tools, computer management and then the disk manager and see if it has a partition. If it's just unallocated space, right click and make one.

indicates that it is a failed hard drive
if that is the case ensure that the replacement is a solid state hard drive
and get and load win 7 as win xp is no longer supported by microsoft

Some externals(formatted in fat32) don't play well with windows 7. If this is the os try it on an xp pc if you can access it remove the data and reformat the drive using ntfs win 7 should see it next time.

yes you could simply format the harddrive in Fat32 using your macos that would be the best solution but don`t forget to backup your data by copy pasting the files on your mac or something else and after that to move them on the external hdd again to be available on the windows machine

ceid3671

In regards to the drive not opening in your Windows XP system most likely you just need to assign it a drive letter. The link below will help you do that.

Let me know if you have any more problems or questions

Issken

http://www.fixya.com/support/r4183994-change_drive_letter_in_windows_xp

You might need to initalize it in XP and then assign a drive letter.

Sometimes it happens in windows XP that you are not able to open drives on your hard disk. When you double click on the drives icons or right click on the drive>>explore in My computer ,the drive does not open.

This problem is generally caused by most of the viruses which infect windows XP system. They block or restrict your access to any of the drives.

But don’t worry this is not a big trouble it can be fixed easily.

Fix:

Normally when a virus infects a windows system which causes a drive opening problem, it automatically creates a file named autorun.inf in the root directory of each drive.

This autorun.inf file is a read only ,hidden and a system file and the folder option is also disabled by the virus. This is deliberately done by the virus in order to protect itself. autorun.inf initiates all the activities that the virus performs when you try to open any drive.



Very simple . virus create some bad registry if you want to solve this problem then delet this registry


[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion­\Explorer\MountPoints2


delete all drive from here

You require Xp Pro that supports SATA - standard Xp is IDE - you must aquire a copy of Xp that is SATA compatible.

Could be problem with the hard drive, could always f disk it to clear the hard drive then do a fresh install of windows xp.