i have a dell laptop latitude c600, when i try to connect usb 2.0 massstorage devive ( which is a hard disk of segate in external casing )my computer does recognize it as an exteranl usb device but the drive letter does not appear because my notebook usb is 1.1 , what should i do ?

It's not the fact that your notebook is 1.1 that it's not showing, it's that a lot of USB hard drives need external power to work with some notebooks.

If it is a large hard drive (20GB or greater) You'll need to use a separte power adapter or a cable that gets power from your PS2 port to power it for the laptop. The notebooks USB bus is under powered.

Musky
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The device may have come with drivers to allow it to be recognized.

Does it show up as a folder?

You can get a USB2 card for your laptop. I'd recommend it.

well i have the hard disk installed in an external casing that has its own power . so it simply means that its not the power issue but something with usb 2.0 and usb 1.1 ...... ???

My USB2 HDD shows up as a drive when connected to the USB 1.1 of my laptop.

I did have to install drivers on my laptop (supppled with the HDD) to get it to do this.

Is this External drive partitioned and formatted?

I didn't realize that you have an externally powered HD case, so your right, power shouldn't be an issue.

Does the drive show up when you go into "Administrative tools/Computer management/storage/disk management"?

If it does, then you may need to partition and format it as Othehill mentioned.

Musky
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hi

well my usb external casing came with a driver named as "fixustar"
when i try to install it i get a message "cannot find the usb storage device for this patch. please plug in ur usb storage device before run the setup program "
but the fact is that i have already pliged in the usb casing .

in addition to this whenever i plug the usb casing the windows does detect it and also displays the message " this device can perform faster "
when i goto the device manager i find this against the usb massstorage device (whic is marked yellow ) ...."windows cannot load the decie driver for this hardware. the driver may be corrupted or missing code 39 "

so what next ???

Try clicking on the device in device manager and see if there is an option to enable or update the driver.