Problems with XP recognising a USB 3.0 PCIe adapter card...

Evening, all.

Mods, if this is, in your opinion, in the wrong forum, please feel free to move it. Thanks!

New member here. I'm mainly a Puppy Linux user these days (traitor, I hear you say! ), but have been using XP ever since the beginning. Currently using a recently re-installed version of the 'Black Edition'.

I have an elderly Compaq Presario desktop PC, from around the time of the HP takeover.....though from examining the mobo, and various of the internals, it would appear to be of pre-HP manufacture (in other words, genuine Compaq.....and hence of good quality.)

It's an SR1619UK. AMD-based; socket 939, originally a single-core Athlon 64 3200+, upgraded for a dual-core 3800+ X2 last year. Still using the built-in ATI Radeon Xpress 200 integrated graphics; this is functioning perfectly, and is sufficient for my needs. I'm in my 50's; not a gamer; mainly into graphic design.

There's been a long list of upgrades; the original WD 160 GB Caviar 'Black' was replaced by a 500 GB Caviar 'Blue' last year. The generic 'silver box' PSU was replaced by a CoolerMaster B50 single-rail 500W last year, too. The original 1 GB of DDR1 RAM is now 4 GB (the most the board will take).

The purpose of my post is this. I have a 500GB Seagate 'Expansion' external USB 3.0 hard drive, mainly used for data storage. Since I transfer a hell of a lot of large files back-and-forth, and this is a USB 3.0 drive (and I don't use the single PCIe slot for a graphics card), I've made use of it with a Transcend PDU3 USB 3.0 adapter card. The PCIe slot is of very early 1.0a standard ( so doesn't give me anywhere near the expected 5 GB/s you'd expect from either a 2.0 or a 3.0 slot), but it's still around a 450-500% speed improvement over a USB 2.0 port. Which I'm more than happy with, given that the machine was a 'freebie' from my sister when XP went EOL year before last!

Since installing this 'Black Edition', I now find that the Seagate simply isn't recognised through the adapter card, and I can't access it at all. Sure, I could plug 'er back into a 2.0 socket, but I don't want to do that.

In 'Device Manager', I have two items showing under 'Other devices', both with a large yellow question mark, and a black exclamation mark on top of that! One is the 'SMBus controller', and the other is the 'Universal Serial Bus (USB) controller'. Since the USB ports all work fine (all 13 of 'em, since one of the 7 on-board ports is occupied by a 7-port, self-powered 'hub'), I don't understand why this is showing. Given that the adapter card is working via the PCIe lanes, you'd think something to do with that would be showing, yes?

I've downloaded, and installed, the appropriate driver for the PDU3 from the Transcend site, but this hasn't made a scrap of difference. Can anybody think of, or suggest, anything else I could try to get XP to recognise the Seagate via this adapter card?

Any advice will be very much appreciated. Cheers!

(Sorry for the length of this for a first post..!!)


Mike.

 

Therein lies the problem. The hard disk drive (HDD) industry adopted a new standard to get everyone to upgrade. Basically, any hard drive sized >320 GB comes in a new format called "Advanced Format" (AF), which isn't compatible with Windows XP. AF is only officially supported in Win7+.

However, you could get around this restriction if you (re-)partition (not format, partitioning an HDD is a different matter) in Windows 7 first. Then, perhaps it might work in XP.

The real issue is Win7 is able to properly align an AF HDD upon partitioning, but Windows XP would need dedicated aligning software from the HDD manufacturer.

To use an unaligned AF HDD in XP would either lead to eventual data corruption, or inability of XP to recognize the HDD.

The only other recourse is to source an HDD < 320 GB as those are guaranteed to NOT be of the AF variety and will definitely work with XP.

(Btw, if an HDD is Advanced Format, there will be an "AF" sign on its label...)

 

Hallo, eatup. Sorry for the long delay in replying.

I spend so much time with Linux, I only use XP occasionally these days, y'see. Anyway; that's an interesting point about the AF (Advanced Format). Might I enquire when this took place? Because it doesn't explain why I have XP running from a 500GB SATA III drive (albeit plugged into a SATA I port), if that's the case.....

And it also doesn't explain why the Seagate works perfectly well on USB 2.0, but not USB 3.0. Was this AF change tied into the advances in the PCI bus architecture, too?


Mike.