Hi to all, I purchased an external USB 2.0 hard disk which has in theory everything to work nicely : autonomous power supply, partitions not exceeding 25 Gb, connected to my notebok via an USB 2.0 PCMCIA card working perfectly. I format partitions in FAT32 (Win XP wil not allow NTFS formatting), I write files to the disk, everything is sky blue ! Then I shut down my notebook and, as soon as I restart it, the USB disk is perfectly detected, but all partitions are totally f... up. Any idea would help - thanks in advance, Claude

XP does allow NTFS, and you can convert from FAT32 to NTFS, but you can't go back to FAT32 again. Do a Google search for 'formatting with ntfs in windows xp' (no quotes) and there's all kinds of stuff. Whether this has to do with your USB problem is another story that I don't know the answer to.

Have you any USB 1 devices? Sometimes the presence of the two kinds of drivers messes up an external USB 2.0 hard drive - I have experienced it a couple of times. Windows XP should be allowing NTFS formatting.

What is the deal with the 25GB partition limit? Is that something the External device requires? NTFS may want to format using FAT32 due to the partition size. It shouldn't matter which file system is in use. Something else is going on here. Are there instructions with the USB drive. Something sticks in my head about partition number limitations on external drives. I may be totally off base here but I know that not all the controllers in USB enclosures are the same. Verify that you are allowed the number of partitions you have created. Also, What kind of partitions are you creating? Are you rebooting after creating these partitions before formatting?

"I purchased an external USB 2.0 hard disk" Who's? Regardless I bet they have software available to format, partiton and generally prep the drive available at their site. This is a good place to start. Jimi_l

Hi to all, thanks for your kind replies to my message. Actually, my notebook (2.5 years old) has a native USB 1.1 bus and I tried to use it to operate the USB disk which is labelled "USB 1.1 compatible". As I had the same problems that I describe (plus low speed), I purchased an USB 2.2 PCMCIA card which does not give better results. All other USB devices (printer, scanner, ADSL modem etc.) are attached to the 1.1 bus. NTFS formatting always fails at the end of the process. The partitioning was done by the seller. My real issue is : why are partition / files structures spoiled as soon as I shut down or hibernate ?

Why don't you try what I suggested and then report back. Jimi_l