I did write a seperate reply for you a few days ago but it doesnt seem to of appeared on the thread?



basically, your problem with the "blip" noise as you describe it - there isn't enough power to spin your drive up, you'll notice also the EL light on the end of the drive dims whilst its trying to spin up. At a guess i would say you are using the extension cable that was also supplied in the box with the UB100. They are very poor quality and have a lot of internal losses, the voltage drop is too much to plug a hard drive into. try this: plug the cable that came with the drive directly into the UB100 (Power & Data plug only into the UB100) and then plug your drive in - it will work fine!

What you have to remember is that a single USB socket can only provide 500mAh of current, most laptop drives are over that limit so this is why you are having the problem you are with a portable hdd. before this drive i was using a Western Digital 80GB Scorpio drive, that was rated 550mAh and i still got it working fine with this WITHOUT a seperate power supply and a fairly long cable.

As for formatting thats not your issue, my old drive i formatted with Partition Magic, i had to get something else for the new drive though as Partition Magic can't physically format a drive over 200GB in size (nothing Norton branded has impressed me to be honest - junk!)

Try what i said above and you'll be in business.

if you've been messing about with the drive lots doing lots of new partitions etc without doing a full surface sweep you may also notice the device takes a long time to start playing music, if thats the case leave the drive to do a full scan overnight with along with a fresh partition, my 250GB drive takes no longer than about 20 secs to fire up and start playing.