Western Digital External Hard Drive Jumper Setting

Posted August 31, 2008 By admin and has no comments yet.




Just installed external hard drive (F) – cannot access files?

Have a tower with SATA hard drive pre-installed with Vista operating system. Took a Western Digital WD1200 hard drive from my old tower and installed it as an external drive via USB port. Set jumper on this drive to “slave.” This drive has XP on it, BTW.

I can see files in the “new” F drive but accessing them and saving to them is sporadic. Mostly I get a “cannot access…” message. I changed my permissions to the F drive (defaulted to read-only) but doesn’t seem to work.

Any suggestions? Many thanks in advance.

If you’re using USB, Windows no longer makes distinctions between master and slave. Therefore, make sure that the internal HD is connected properly to the USB enclosure. It may help to remove the jumper so that the drive doesn’t send messages along the USB cable which can confuse Windows. Also make sure you’re using a faster USB2 port and USB2 cable.

Categories: Uncategorized