Sometimes I love Google, and sometimes I hate it.

I recently purchased a Playstation 3 (GTA4 is superb, btw) and it didn’t take me long to realize that upgrading the 80gb hard drive would be worth a bit of time and spare change.  As such, I picked up a new hard drive and swapped it into the PS3.

But what to do with the 80gb that came with the system?  Rather than toss a perfectly functional drive into storage, I picked up this inexpensive little external SATA enclosure ^[1] and plugged my original PS3 drive into it.

That’s when the trouble started.

First I discovered that my desktop PC didn’t pull enough power through the USB ports to power my new external drive.  (I realized this after several minutes of googling variations on “external drive red light beeping incessantly”.)  Unfortunately, this left me with only my XP laptop to get the new drive up and running.

To my surprise, my little laptop had no trouble powering the drive, and XP even recognized it as a mass storage device.

So what was the problem?

The new drive didn’t appear anywhere.  No drive letter.  No useful information in device manager.  No pop-up asking me to format the drive or open it in a new explorer window or anything of the sort.

So I did what any normal person would do in this situation – I turned to Google.  Various solutions came up, but the two main solutions – to disable any IEEE 1394 (firewire) ports and/or install updated drivers – didn’t help.  My laptop doesn’t have any firewire ports, and the generic mass storage drivers were already what I needed.

More googling revealed variations on these two ideas, but nothing more.

Out of options, I turned to the next best thing – screwing with various control panel settings.  As fate would have it, this eventually solved my problem.

Here’s my solution, for any others experiencing trouble with an external drive.

1. Open control panel.
2. Double-click “Administrative Tools”
3. Double-click “Computer Management”
4. From the LH menu, select “Storage” -> “Disk Management”
5. The RH pane should show all hard drives attached to the system.  One of these should be labeled “Disk 0″.  This is most likely your default hard drive.  Double-check the partitions and drive sizes to confirm this.
6. Assuming that you only have your default hard drive and your external hard drive installed, directly beneath “Disk 0″ should be “Disk 1.”  (If you have other drives installed, you may need to go down to “Disk 2″ or “Disk 3″.)  Double-check that the functional size of your external drive matches the size listed for this drive.
7. If this is the proper drive, right-click the button to the left of the partition bar for “Disk 1″.  The ensuing context menu should have an “Initialize” option at the top.  Click it.
8. Step through the dialogs to confirm partition, name, formatting, etc.  Once you’ve finished, let the computer format your new drive.  This may take awhile.
9. Once done, enjoy your new drive!

While this may not work for everyone, it certainly worked for me.  Feel free to comment on your success/failure using this method – and good luck!

(And yes – this was one yet one more reminder why I use Ubuntu ^[2] instead of XP whenever possible.)