Question : Problem: USB External Drive works on some machines, not on others.

I have 5 machines... of which one is a 64 bit XP machine, the rest are a mix of 32bit XP and 2000 machines.

I formatted a 250GB hard drive (external, USB) on one of them, I can't remember which at this point.  I've been copying data to it from the 64bit machine with no problem.  The trouble is, no matter what other 32bit machine I plug it into, it shows up as "Local Drive" and appears not to be formatted.  Device Manager shows everything normal, the drivers, etc are all installed.

I ran SpinRtie and it found no problems.

One interesting note: no errors are logged to then event log on the 2000 machine, but on the 32bit XP machine I get the following:
Source: ftdisk
The fault tolerant driver could not read the on disk structures from disk 1.
Event Id 31


Does anyone have any idea what the problem could be?

Thanks,
CS

Answer : Problem: USB External Drive works on some machines, not on others.

What brand enclosure is it?  And, do you know what/who is the manufacturer of the chipset that is inside the enclosure?  It's possible to get an updated firmware for the chipset, although I've found myself that most oem's that sell usb2 enclosures don't give that kind of support.  You could inspect the logic board inside the enclosure and try and find the website from there to see if there are any reported interface problems with that card.

The other possibility is on the end of the one pc that doesn't recongize it propertly.  You can purchase a separate PCI USB2 controller card for about $10 to $15.  Then connect the external USB2 drive to your new PCI card and see what happens.  I've seen several PC's (older ones) that had problems with the motherboard usb2 interface.  After buying a separate PCI card, problems went away.

Other possibility/approach is to update the pc BIOS on those pc's having probems.  See if that helps.