Liteon Hard Drive "Not Read" on Computer

*leaglebob* · 18-11-2005

This is a follow up to several threads of mine. I can remove the hard drive from the 5045 and copy its contents to a retail Seagate 160GB hard drive that is attached to my computer via a usb/ide adapter cable. This cloned drive can then be accessed and files copied, moved, edited etc. The Liteon Original hard drive cannot be seen on that cable and has to be connected to an ide cable directly in order to be seen.

Then I disconnect the cloned hard drive and it can be used in the Liteon as a good replacement drive. THEN I put that same cloned drive back on the end of the ide/usb cable and it cannot be seen until reattached via a direct ide connection.

I have moved the grounding connector from "cable select" to master as required by the different connections.

My Question--out of pure curiosity--what is it about putting the liteon recorded material on a hard drive makes it unreadable at the end of my ide/usb adapter cables? ((additional info--I have used multiple cables and attachment points all of which work on other hard drives==so I do think this is purely a windows issue==but could I be missing something?))

Last edited by leaglebob; 18-11-2005 at 04:46. Reason: add notification and more facts

**Seán** · 18-11-2005

The only thing I can think of is if the LiteOn modifies the partition table or some other low-level information on the hard disc that causes incompatibility with your IDE/USB driver. I had a similar issue with a laptop hard drive which got a bad sector at the start of the hard drive. While the laptop could not fully boot into Windows, it was possible to access files on the hard drive using a boot disk. However when I popped the hard drive into a USB2 2.5” housing to read on a PC, Windows would show “Found new hardware…”, the HD light would glow solid on the USB2 case and Windows would stop responding until I unplugged the drive. On the other hand, it seems strange then that my USB2 2.5” case can recognise totally blank new hard drives without even a partition table, like as you mention when your Seagate HD was new.

So far, I have only came across one issue similar to that. My last digital camera used FAT formatted Compact Flash cards. Unfortunately, one time after copying my pictures of a 32MB card I had at the time (few years back), I accidentally formatted the card in NTFS. When I popped it in the camera, it showed “Card is Full”, yet if I went to view what was on the card using the camera, it showed “No image”, so I tried formatting the card in the camera, but it still showed “Card is Full”. I then tried formatting the card with my PC’s memory card reader in FAT, however when I put it back in my camera, it still showed “Card is Full”. I then tried all sorts of methods of formatting the card including a full format, FAT with different size clusters, third party disk tools, etc., all without success. In the end, I had to purchase a new memory card and double-check my file system selection before formatting the card each time.

It's a pity to have to resort back to opening the PC case just to access your LiteOn's HD. The only other thing I can suggest is to try looking for a firmware update for your USB/IDE adaptor.

NoiseGate · 19-11-2005

The LiteOnFAT is certainly not quite standard, and it's possible a fussy USB adaptor is dissatisfied with it, and won't register it.

I can put my drives straight on to an external USB/IDE adaptor, and leave them in cable select, without any problems -- but that's with a machine still running Win98. I haven't yet tried that on the Win2k Pro or XP Pro machines, simply because those OSs are known to want to write undo information on to a drive as soon as they see it, and I reckon the 5045 would do its nut if it encountered anything like that!

As it's non-standard, I've always treated the LiteOnFAT as read-only. Indeed, the obscure indexing used by the firmware would prevent anything copied on to the drive whilst attached to a PC being able to be treated by the 5045 as accessible, so there's not much point in trying.

*leaglebob* · 19-11-2005

Thanks for your thoughtful replies. While "usb" is becoming a standard attachment, it is still *interesting* that it is not yet fully integrated. I notice that the Seagate install disk that came with their harddrive 3 months ago could not install a disk without turning off the usb controller in the bios. It was pleasant to see that with the hard drive I got last week, the install disk works just fine. I further notice that "sometimes" I can boot from an external drive, and sometimes I can't. I've read of several similar issues with SATA cables==>>>all to the point of making me think if I wanted to be real conservative, I would add hard drives to my system by adding an ide card rather than the new generation of stuff???- - or is 90% compatibility the standard? (smile!)

I will assume that "some" usb connections "might" see the Liteon but that most of them will not because of the FatLiteon program being there- - - but thinking about it==I did format the drive with windows Fat32 BEFORE simply copying the files from the Liteon to the extra drive==that doesn't sound like "formating a disk" at all--in fact, the files don't even seem to have much to them and should be simply sitting on top of the Fat 32 format?==but obviously "somthing" like that is going on and I am happy its not me or my converters. Things are good in who-ville. Thanks again. PS==In about a week I will have burned all the copied files to dvd and I have already moved the Liteon files to an ide connected drive--so it will be fun to see if doing that will make the drive readable again==I'll report back.////Thanks again.

*leaglebob* · 20-11-2005

Well--I can't burn the dvd's without taking that hard drive out==so I did. It is now seen at the end of my ide/usb converter cable!!!

Now===>I can see how loading the Liteon files onto a hard drive and then rebooting could alter the partition files, mbr, and so forth making it difficult for the usb drivers to see but its kinda amazing that removing those files and rebooting somehow fixes everything??

So--if I want easy access to my Liteon Harddrive, looks like installing removable racks really is the way to go. All I need to do now is find an ide extension cable because the Liteon ide cable is 1 inch long and the external rack needs 1.25 inches to fit ==and actually about a foot or more to install the rack as designed .

Anybody know how to extend an ide cable .25 inches? (smile--bobbo)

Liteon Hard Drive "Not Read" on Computer

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