How to: My Book on Windows 2003 Server

As your equipment ages, things break, hard drives crash, all sorts of fun.  You also end up with new equipment trying to interface with older OSs and programs.

Soon I will have a post about dealing with a boinked Bugzilla on an old Linux distro with a very old MySQL needing full updates before they can be of any use.

But for now, my colleague Allan Cady, recently had to try to figure out why the heck our Western Digital My Book USB drive wouldn't be recognized by Windows 2003 on an older server.  After he was done, I asked him to write up a how-to for me to toss on the blog to help future travelers.

Allan says:

How to use a Western Digital "My Book" drive (Home Edition, but I don't think that matters) in Windows 2003 Server:

1. Follow instructions for normal connection using USB, then:
2. Start -> My Computer -> (right-click) Manage Open Storage -> Disk Management  External drive will appear in list of partitions, but it will be inactive and will not have a drive letter assigned.
3. Right-click on the partition, select Mark Partition as Active
4. Right-click on the partition again,
5. select Change Drive Letter and Paths,
6. click Add.  Assign a drive letter.
7. The drive should now be accessible. 

This procedure should only be necessary the first time the drive is plugged in.

As with most OS wrangling ... fairly simple to explain, but fairly inexplicable when you first try to plug the thing in.

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Comments

[Jason]

I've found this pretty common with external drives on several flavors of windows.

I've never seen you having to mark the partition as active, but I often see having to assign a drive letter. So it's a good trick to remember, unfortunate that it's necessary to fill your head with useless tidbits about how to do things that should be done for you.

[Jacinda]

Thank you so much for this info. Worked like a charm!

[Dan]

This helped, thanks very much!