Trying to help my brother. He had an 80 gig Maxtor drive in his old computer and got a new Dell Inspiron 600m. He bought an aluminum 3.5" USB 2.0 enclosure for the drive to use with his laptop. When we hooked it up the drive shows up in My Computer, but it says it needs formatted. It was formatted in NTFS on the old computer so not sure why. In any case, he doesnt care if he loses the data if we reformat, but it also shows it as only a 31 gig drive if we look at the properties as it is right now. If anyone can let me know what we need to do I'd really appreciate it!

What file system is he using on the computer? If he is using FAT 32 then he won't be able to see the USB drive.

Nah, the Dell is NTFS too. Checked that.

I'm not sure what is going on but I can present some info that may help. WinXP won't format a HD bigger than 32GB using FAT32. According to MSoft, winXP will mount a drive larger than 32GB if already formatted. It seems more than co-incidental that you are talking about 31GB here. It may have something to do with the controller in the external exclosure. I have noticed that some models will accept drive sizes much different than other models. Maybe the largest drive the controller can handle is 32GB. I would check with the maker of the enclosure before doing any more troubleshooting.

Thanks for the info. The enclosure supports drives up to 300 GB. It seemed odd to me too - which is why I came here. The laptop uses NTFS, the drive is formatted in NTFS, and the enclosure supports up to 300 GB. Just figures it wouldn't work properly on the first try - but then it wouldn't be a computer I guess. I'll try some stuff and see what I can do I guess.