i have a brand new philips divx and a metal gear box hard drive. the drive is partitioned, and only one side (i think) can be brought up in usb. nothing in the manual for either device states any info about this. do i need to break the partition? that seems very stupid and unnecessary. i have a whole side of videos i can't watch because i can't seem to figure this out.
Are you talking about a standard, internal IDE drive? Regardless of whether it is partitioned or not (or how many partitions it may have), they should all be recognized by your basic Operating System. How did you manage to "lose" all your videos? I wouldn't try to REpartition the drive if you still value those videos - you will lose them all if you try. I also use a couple of external 250-gig USB drives. My OS (Win-2000) recognizes those just fine as well. Honestly, billt1000, I wouldn't partition a drive today unless I had to. (I've had more problems with doing that than I care to remember, like half the drive's capacity suddenly being "lost" even when I completely UNpartitioned everything and started again from scratch). Drives, whether internal or external, whether IDE or USB, have so much capacity and are so (relatively) inexpensive today over what they used to be, I wouldn't mess around with partitions anymore. If you can manage to find (salvage) your videos - I would try to temporarily store them somewhere (even offline on blank discs), then get rid of any partitions my drive(s) may have. (Just a thought).