In many cases, the drive itself is not actually defective, but the problems arise from the media used, incorrectly installed drivers or software and possibly a faulty operating system. Therefore you should carefully go through the possible sources of error to avoid the effort of replacing the drive. This section of FAQs includes several methods for remedying the problem. If this doesn't help, please contact our hotline.

If the drive is actually defective, you have to distinguish between the following two possibilities:

1. If the drive was installed in another device (e.g. PC, laptop, external housing, MP3 player, etc.) when purchased, then it can only be repaired by the device manufacturer. Please contact the device manufacturer for information on the repair procedure.
2. If you bought the device separately from a shop, then guarantee claims can only be made with the shop which sold you the drive. The contents of the guarantee comply with the legal regulations in the country, in which the product was purchased.

Toshiba does NOT provide a direct repair service for anyone other than our direct customers. It is not possible to make claims directly to Toshiba in cases of possible defects. Therefore you should NEVER send a defective drive to Toshiba representatives, because they cannot process this type of transaction!

In most cases, you will receive a different drive to the one you sent for repair in order to speed up the exchange process and reduce your waiting time. The exchanged product can be a new or a repaired drive.

It is Toshibas policy to ensure a maximum level of data security. Therefore all data on any HDD will be securely erased as the first step of the repair process. This ensures that nobody is able to misuse any of the data stored on your drive.
Toshiba does not provide any data recovery service. If you are in urgent need of the data on your defective HDD, please contact specialized data recovery companies like Ontrack, Convar, Vogon or others BEFORE sending the drive for repair.

-> Toshiba warranty info

You can very easily get the drive’s age from its serial number "S/N abcdefghi jkl". In this serial number, "a" is the production month (1=January...9=September, X=October, Y=November, Z=December) and "b" the last digit of the year.
For example: "S/N X5SO9163T 354" was produced in October 2005 ("X5").

In most cases, rattling noises are normal and are no reason to worry. They are caused by mechanical parts of the HDD and just indicate that the drive is reading, writing or calibrating itself. Even if the drive is not being actively written to or read from, most operating systems do a lot of accesses to the system disk in the background. So if there is no additional indication for a defect, just the noise alone does not indicate that the drive is faulty.

1. For using a PC-Card drive under Windows NT 4 or DOS you need to buy an additional software that enables the PCMCIA port, such as Cardware or Cardwizard (see e.g. http://www.systemsoft.com/ )
   
   
2. Apart from the 2 GB version of this drive (which is FAT16 preformatted) the Toshiba PC-Card HDD is preformatted with FAT32 file system. Because this file system is not implemented in Windows NT 4 or DOS you need to change it to FAT16 (DOS/NT) or NTFS (NT) before you can use the drive. The maximum size of one FAT16 partition is limited to 2 GB. If you have a drive that is larger than 2 GB (e.g. MK5002MPL) you need to split it into multiple partition with maximum size of 2 GB each, otherwise you will not be able to format it with FAT16 file system!

This question can only be answered by your notebook manufacturer! The physical dimensions and connectors have not changed within famillies of HDDs (e.g. all 2.5” PATA-drives, all 2.5” SATA drives or all Toshiba 1.8” drives) during the past years, but there are a lot of parameters (like power consumption, heat, …) that could differ. Also, older BIOS versions may have difficulties recognizing modern HDDs which exceed a certain storage capacity. So please contact your notebook manufacturer or certified dealer for information on which HDDs can be used in your notebook.

One reason may be that your computer is using an old BIOS that is not able to deal with drives exceeding a certain capacity, so it can only address a part of the drive.
If this is not the reason but the usable size is just a bit smaller than expected, this issue is probably due to different ways of calculating the size, either using the decimal or a binary system:
In a decimal system 1 GB = 1,000 MB = 1,000,000 KB = 1,000,000,000 Byte
But most operating systems calculate with factor 1024 instead of 1000: 1GB=1024MB=1024x1024KB= 1,073,741,824 Byte. Because of this, all drives seem to be around 1.074 times smaller under the operating system than they really are.

For example: An 80GB drive can store 80,000,000,000 bytes, but the operating system divides this number by 1.074 and therefore shows the drive as having a capacity of 74.5GB only. But this does NOT mean that you loose 5.5GB. It is still the same number of bytes that can physically be stored in both ways of calculating!

Windows 2000 and Windows XP do not contain any drivers for SATA controllers.You will have to get the correct drives from the manufacturer of your SATA controller and copy them onto a floppy disc or CD. When installing Windows 200 or Windows XP you must install these drivers by pressing F6 at the beginning of the OS installation. Please note that this is not a hard disk drive issue, but a controller issue, so please contact the manufacturer of the controller (or in most cases of your notebook).

Toshiba doesn't have a license to bundle any Disk Manager or diagnostic software with the HDD at the time of supply.
We also do not distribute this software as a separate item.

If you are interested in a Disk Manager, please contact software distributors which offer them directly, e.g.: OnTrack (www.ontrack.com)

Please contact the following company:

Adapter-King
www.adapter-king.de
Telephone: +49 (0) 2833 - 573 446

As a business customer, you could also contact the manufacturer directly:
ES&S Oliver Reiners
www.esskabel.de
Telephone: +49 (0) 2162 - 266 18 0

For technical support please refer to the following web-page: http://www.amacom-tech.com.

M	P	B	3	0	6	4	AT
Fujitsu ID	Product Family	Model Series	Form Factor	Capacity			Interface

Fujitsu ID	This will be M for the majority of Fujitsu products.
Product Family	A = AL Series C = CAT series D = Dynamo H = HN series P = PB series
Model Series	A, B, C ... This shows the development programme of a particular product.
Form Factor	2 = 2.5 inch 3 = 3.5 inch
Capacity	The capacity * 10 measured in GB 064 = 6.4 GB; 182 = 18.2GB etc.
Interface	AT = ATA AP = ATAPI FC = Fibre Channel LC = LVDS (SCSI ULTRA-2) SCA connector LP = LVDS (SCSI ULTRA 2) 68 pin connector SC = SCSI SCA SP = SCSI 68 pin SS = SCSI-2 single ended

The system requirements are:

• Microsoft Windows 2000, XP or Vista
• Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later
• Available USB 2.0 port

Compatibility may vary depending on user's hardware configuration and operating system.

Yes, the drive is formatted with FAT32.

No. The Toshiba External Hard Disk Drive is shipped without any software.

No. The Toshiba External Hard Disk Drive is a Plug and Play device and does not require any software to be seen by and used by your PC.

Very rarely the bus power of the PC's USB port could be limited. In such cases the Toshiba External Hard Disk Drive might fail to spin up if you connect it via the supplied single-ended USB cable. The usage of a Y-shaped USB cable should solve this problem.

Please contact our Technical Support hotline (www.storage.toshiba.eu) for further support.

To connect your Toshiba External Hard Disk Drive to your PC computer:

• Turn on your computer and wait for the operating system to boot up.
• Connect the USB cable to the Hard Disk Drive first and then to the computer.
• You should see a new icon appear in the system tray and the drive should appear in the Device Manager.

To disconnect your Toshiba External Hard Disk Drive from your PC computer:

Windows:

• Double-click the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon in your system tray.
• Select the "USB Mass Storage Device" from the window and click on "Stop".
• Then click on "OK" to confirm and wait for the confirmation dialog.
• Disconnect the cable from the Toshiba Portable External Hard Drive.

Macintosh:

• Locate the Toshiba External Hard Disk Drive icon on the desktop.
• Drag the icon to the Trash icon in the dock.
• When the icon disappears from the desktop, disconnect the cable from the Toshiba External Hard Disk Drive.

In many cases, the drive is not really defective and the problems you found are just caused by drivers not being properly installed, or possibly a corrupt operating system. So, to save yourself the effort of exchanging the drive, please go through the possible error sources carefully. This FAQ section provides you with some methods of resolving possible problems. If this does not help, please feel free to contact our hotline service (http://www.storage.toshiba.eu/).

If it turns out that the drive really is defective, then please return the drive to the dealer who sold you the drive.

Please note that Toshiba DOES NOT provide any direct RMA service for endusers.

NEVER send a defective drive to a Toshiba office as this cannot be processed!

This message can be caused by a defective setup information file (.INF).

Please proceed with the following steps in order to delete the file "C:WindowsINFINFCache.1":

1. Duoble-click "My computer"
2. Click on "Tools" and then on "Folder options"
3. Move to the page "View"
4. Please activate "Show hidden files and folders"
5. Click "Apply" and close the window
6. Double-click "My computer"
7. Double-click the drive letter where Windows is installed
8. Open the Windows installation folder and double-click the "inf" folder
9. Look for the file "INFCACHE.1" and delete it
10. Reboot your PC
11. The system now creates a new setup information file

Note: After completing above steps please undo step no. "4"

1. Windows XP Home Edition: Add the Backup utility
   
   If you're using Windows XP Home Edition and you want to install the Backup utility, you must locate your original Windows XP CD first. Add the Backup utility manually to your computer from the CD by following these steps:
   
   a. Insert your Windows XP CD into the drive and, if necessary, in My Computer, double-click the CD icon to display the Welcome screen.
   b. On the Welcome to Microsoft Windows XP screen, click Perform Additional Tasks.
   c. Click Browse this CD.
   d. In Windows Explorer, double-click the ValueAdd folder, then Msft, and then Ntbackup.
   e. Double-click Ntbackup.msi to install the Backup utility.
   
   For additional information about how to use Backup to restore files and folders, visit the Microsoft Knowledge Base article
   
2. Windows XP Professional: Use the built-in Backup utility
   
   If you use Windows XP Professional, you can use the built-in Backup utility to help you make copies of files, settings, or everything on your computer. You can even use the utility to back up certain files on a schedule that you specify. Here's how to start using the Backup utility:
   
   a. Click Start, and point to All Programs.
   b. Point to Accessories, and then point to System Tools.
   c. Click Backup.
   
   If you've never used the Backup utility, the first screen you will see is the Backup or Restore Wizard welcome window. Click Next and follow the instructions on the wizard. For a more detailed step-by-step guide to using the wizard, see http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/bott_03july14.mspx

To initialise the Toshiba External Hard Disk Drive and to prepare for usage please look up the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article:

How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP

This article describes how to configure basic disks in Windows XP by using the "Disk Management" tool.
Additionally it describes how to create and delete partitions and how to format volumes with FAT, FAT32 or NTFS file systems.

This is caused by the format on Toshiba's external Hard Disk Drives.
Toshiba external hard drives are pre-formatted with a FAT32 file system in order to maintain Mac OS compatibility. FAT32 is recognized by most computer operating systems, but has a 4 GB file size limitation. This means you cannot create a file or transfer a file or group of files larger that 4GB to the hard drive.

To resolve this issue, your Toshiba drive must be reformatted or converted to NTFS.
NTFS does not have a transfer or file creation size limitation.

For detailed instructions on how to reformat or convert a FAT32 formatted hard drive to NTFS, please visit the following Microsoft Knowledge Base Articles:

How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000/EN-US/

How to convert a FAT16 volume or a FAT32 volume to NTFS file system in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307881/EN-US/

NOTE: We strongly recommend that you create a full back up of your disk contents before you make any changes to your external Hard Disk Drive. If you reformat your drive to NTFS you will not be able to use the drive while connected to a Windows 98SE or Windows ME computer.