Learning pains

I bought an 80Gb portable hard disk at the last PC Fair in Penang this month and I was struggling to set it up. It shouldn't have been a problem at all but in truth, I had never handled a portable HDD before. I've always thought all hard disks are very delicate and need to be handled carefully, unlike thumbdrives.

I did read in the manual that if I were to hook the portable HDD to my MacBook, the installation would be taken care of automatically. So, putting great faith in this suggestion, I connected the portable HDD to the MacBook through the USB port and just pressed Enter, Enter, Enter all the way until the end of the process. I didn't bother to read the step-by-step instructions clearly.

That was when my problems began. Accessing the portable HDD with my MacBook using its Mac OS X was easy. Heck, I was already transferring files to it and happily creating folders and sub-folders.

But I just couldn't connect the beast to any of my desktop home PCs. Sure, I could see a message telling me a new USB device was detected but I could not see it at all in My Computer or Windows Explorer.

My Mac sifu, Yap Kant, from CG Computers told me that I should've chosen MS DOS format when I first plugged the portable HDD into the MacBook. But never mind, I could still do it if I didn't mind losing everything that I had already transferred there.

No problem with me, as long as I'm able to get it to work on both the MacBook and my Windows desktops. I must've gone through the process about 10 times but each time, my desktops would only smell the portable HDD. Nothing more than that. Exasperation. Couldn't anyone help me?

In desperation, I thought of one final trick. Could it be that the 2.5-inch drive needed more power? I connected a power adapter to the four-port USB hub on my desktop and then plugged in the portable HDD.

Suddenly, it worked! All that it needed was that extra juice. I'm now the happy owner of an 80Gb 2.5-inch Western Digital portable hard disk drive.