In spite of my profession and general nerd tendencies, I have never written a technical post on my blog, but I cannot resist today. Since I know my blog gets indexed by Google, I figure I may be able to help some other poor sap with this problem.

For about a year, I’ve had an impossible time getting my Maxtor OneTouch external harddrive to work. I initially bought it to backup important documents from the computers on my network. Kind of hard to use it in that capacity when it’s not even recognized by the OS!

I would plug it in and the computer would make its regular sound for a USB device being plugged in, but it was invisible. Today, I ran a program called TestDisk to see if the partition was messed up. Turns out it didn’t even HAVE a partition. So I Googled another entry and was trying to see how I could run fdisk through Windows XP. Turns out XP doesn’t have fdisk, but it has something better.

Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management

There was my “invisible” hard drive! All I had to do was right click and format it in NTFS and now it’s ready to go! I’m pretty happy about this. I bought it about 2 years ago. Today is the first time I’ve saved something to it. The power of (intermittent) persistence!