Archive

Posts Tagged ‘drives’

When your Windows doesn’t see USB Stick or external HDD?

March 3rd, 2009 No comments

If you have inserted a USB Stick or external HDD and its not there in the my computer as a drive then try the following.

  1. Open Control Panel and double click Administrative Tools
  2. Double click Computer Management
  3.  Left click Disk management in the left hand task plane
  4. Use the lower right hand task plane to find the removable device 
  5. Right click the removable disks space and select Change drive letter and Paths…
  6. Click Change and select a letter that is not in use
  7. Select a letter that is not in use
  8. Click Ok and click Yes to the warning (becarefull to only do this to drives that are not in use, dont do it to your windows drive!!)
  9. Now the drive will appear in My Computer

 

Alternativly you could try Acronis Disk Management to takle any other disk related problems

Thanks to Ewa Paszkiewicz for this Article

Portable USB Linux = Mandriva 2008 + 4bg OCZ Rally2 USB

February 25th, 2008 No comments

I have recently being looking to get a memory stick which boots Linux, so that I can develop websites and write programs in a contained environment.

I purchased a 4 gig OCZ Rally2 USB drive from Amazon for £25 and tested several Linux operating systems, using the guides at www.pendrivelinux.com.

I also wanted to get Beryl (now Compiz) working on the stick. I tried Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy, 7.04 Feisty, 6.10 and 6.06 – however Compiz only partially worked on some of them and each were very slow to boot. Also my network card was only detected in 7.10 which seamed to hang on the grub loader then kick into life(bout 3 min boot time).

I then tried pendrivelinux’s version of Mandriva http://www.pendrivelinux.com/2008/02/13/pendrivelinux-2008-install-from-windows/ – the install was fast and painless and the boot time was 30 – 45 seconds which is great!

The best thing about this OS build was the amount of software already installed and all my hardware “just worked” on both my laptop and my desktop – even Bluetooth and wireless worked straight out of the box.

Compiz comes pre-installed too with Intel and ATI drivers, so all I needed to do was install the NVIDIA driver and I was all set!

I now find myself using the USB pendrive more than my installed operating system because of the speed and flexibility. Big thanks to www.pendrivelinux.com!

pixel Portable USB Linux = Mandriva 2008 + 4bg OCZ Rally2 USB