i guess i'm s.o.l as i no longer have another computer to pop the drive into. and under diskpart it reads two drives, disk 0 with a size of 37gb (my laptop's drive) and disk 1 with a size of 32gb (the external). i also updated the drivers for the external drive case, but to no prevail... sigh... i can't believe we can't figure this out. but thanks though.