Vista 64 and USB2.0 HDD adapters

[TheForce]

I discovered a major issue with my work station that uses these adapters or similar. They are simply not recognized. So far I have had to resort to 1394 FW adapters to connect my drives to my new computer.

I see they are listed without any reference to Vista 64 OS. Am I SOL on using these now? I have no issue with using the FW adapters for now, just that they are big.

The self contained drives from WD and Maxtor that are USB 2.0 all work fine.

 

[Agonizing Fury]

Regardless of whether or not the specs say it supports Vista x64, if your other drives are working, these "should" be as well due to this feature listed

Complies with USB Mass Storage Class specification

Should be the same driver as any of your other External USB Drives. Was there a drive hooked up to it when you plugged it into the workstation?

 

[TheForce]

I had two "external" USB hard drives, a WD and a Maxtor connected. I tried to connect an internal style drive with one of those cables as well as a different IDE only style and neither was recognized. Yes, they both work well on my XP computers.
Obviously, there is something different about them. And, because these little adapters are source hidden it is difficult to impossible to get any kind of real tech support so we're stuck with what is published like I linked to. In other words, if it doesn't expressly say windows Vista 64 bit then we should not assume it is vista capable regardless of any other link of specs like you suggested. Too bad as I wish it were that simple. At any rate I wish you or someone can show me what I am doing wrong so I can get these things to work.

PS- I have one more drive adapter that I haven't tried. It is a SATA drive to USB2.0 cable. This would be the newest technology internal drive adapter. I'll post the results back when I test that one. I only have one SATA drive here that I use in this maner, as an eSATA with USB adapter cable.

 

[Agonizing Fury]

Just out of curiosity, does it come up and say that it can't find the drivers, or does nothing happen at all? What do you see under the Device manager for USB Devices? If you need help answering any of these questions let me know. I'd love to be able to help. I've run into my own collection of driver problems for Vista 64 which is why I'm currently running 32 bit, but a simple Mass storage device should not be a big issue. hopefully we can get it figured out.

 

[TheForce]

There is no driver loaded for the device in the DM. And that is what the problem is.

I have an experiment to try to point to a driver that works for the Maxtor external drives.

I went to CompUSA yesterday and they had a number of these on the shelf of different makes and styles. I examined all of them and found one fancy one with LED lights and SATA ATA combo. The box clearly stated VISTA compatible. So I bought one and guess what? It doesn't work either, yet works well for XP. It vame with a drivers disk so I took a peek at that and all that had was drivers for win98. NOthing mentioned in the manual about Vista; only on the box. I got ripped off!

It's not a big deal because I do have my 1394 adapter board I use that was scavanged out of an external hard drive case. I am using fire wire now and it works fine.

Also, I have a slot open on mother board and was considering adding an IDE cable slip through to the outside but that is not hot swappable and has other limitations.

 

[GaryPen]

I have heard anecdotal evidence that there is an issue with some "Vista-compatible" SW not working on 64-bit Vista, but works OK on 32-bit.

 

[TheForce]

Yes, Gary. I was extremely worried about this and the two main suites I wanted for this machine were CS3 and Sony Vegas / DVDA. These were the main purpose for getting this class hardware and OS. I polled many professional editors and received assurance that not only were there no issues but that Vegas actually made use of the quad core and additional ram tested to 24 Gb for very fast render times.
I waited a year to make the move and other than this USB 2 to IDE adapter problem, I have had no issues with the rest of the system. Well sort of... I'm not real happy with the sound quality I have with the DD5.1 speaker system. Itg is analog connected and the crossover balance just sucks. I had a Logitech and pulled them. Improved with an Altec Lansing and while better, still sucks. I'd like to try a Bose but they want too much money for that system and I'll need an outboard amp to drive them. The computer Bose also sound terrible. My problem is I'm spoiled by my Home theater which has, well lets just say it won't fit in the edit suite.

 

[snathanb]

Just curious... did you try looking for the drive under "Disk Manager"? I had a similar problem as yours, although it was on a 32-bit Vista PC. I plugged in a drive and got no indication at all that the computer saw it under Device Manager. However, when I went to Disk Manager, it was there. All I had to do was assign it a drive letter, then it showed up under Device Manager and in Windows Explorer.