Community Newsletter: Q&A forum: 7/14/06 Help, my external hard drive is not recognized by my PC

I've intermittently had a similar problem with an external tv card. After cleaning up the hd and defragmenting it, the tv-card isn't recognised the next time I use it. The problem is solved by re-installing the USB 2.0 driver. I'm just guessing that if a device is not used for a while and maybe the pc is turned off when the device is turned off, windows does some spring cleaning of it's own and deletes or compacts and stores away what it thinks are unused drivers. When I install the driver I get a message that it's not on Microsofts list certified hardware so maybe that's the punishment.

Another option is to install a USB 2.0 controller card. I have one in my older, backup system, which has only USB 1.1 ports on the motherboard.

I back up my primary system to an external USB 2.0 drive. When I need to copy files to the backup system, I move the USB cable to a port on the controller card. It works just fine.

I prefer SIIG controller cards. They work right out of the box each time, assuming that you follow the simple directions.

We've run into this problem a time or two at work, and each time we were able to recover the data by connecting the drive to a Macintosh, so if you have access to a Mac give it a shot.

I ran into this same situation once, and discovered the external hard drive had been password protected using the external hard drive installation / set-up software. Once I reinstalled it, I was prompted for a password, entered it, and bingo the drive appeared. Not sure if this is what your situation is, but it is possible.

Your solution #2 "Double check disk manager to see if the drive is being seen, sometimes you may have to reassign it a different logical drive letter. Click on START > CONTROL PANEL > ADMINISTATIVE TOOLS > COMPUTER MANAGEMENT > DISK MANAGEMENT" is probably the the most common solution to the problem. External drives can lose their drive designation and not be visible through Windows Explorer.
You can also open "My Computer" and if there is a drive with no name and if there is then the sabove solution would resolve that problem.

recognizes the External Hard Drive even though the computer doesn't..

Primary, Logical, Hidden, Active...features will solve his problem in about three minutes of manipulations.

i read through most of the posts here, when I finally came across yours. Did as you suggested and it worked. Thanks my hard drive is now recognized. I was about to return it but save myself a lot of hassle


thanks

Hi,

So I have a question concerning this. Whats another more permanent method of back-up, besides floppys. I have my important files backed-up on CD, but well one scratch and you know how that goes...so what about that? How are memory keys? Or do you recommend Zip Drives? What is the most reliable.

Thanks,
Stacey

I had this problem and finally solved it by reinstalling an updated version of the backup software. Before that the error message I was getting made me concentrate on the USB port - the message said that I was using a 1.1 port, but needed a 2.0 port. The USB ports were all 2.0. It turned out that a newer software version fixed this problem. My back-up drive is a Western Digital and software is Retrospect 6.5.

Since the drive is running and lights are on, I think that you have a software issue. (By the way, your Dell will have the drive manufacturer and model available in the device manager. My othe computer - a Dell - uses a Samsung HD, yours will have whatever mfg fits Dell's requirement and price!).

a fairly good method you have. Fault tolerence is the key and it sounds like you have it handled very well. Good advice!


Paul

to you and I don't mean so.. but if you Google right now, you will find more than a handfull of issues with mac and external drives dissapearing\not detected. The difference? Many more willfull people and fixes to help that certain issue, I will grant Mac that.

Paul

Hmm...I dunno. I have a 200Gb external drive in a fan-cooled enclosure (that I use for storage only, not working files) which is actually subject to a lot less knocking around than my tower (on the floor)...

...and I've never felt the need to ''accidentally drop'' my external HD! lol

But I've encountered San's issue (on a Windows system with old USB 1.1 but with an added USB 2.0 card).

Before I wised up and bought a ''Plug & Play and hot swappable'' enclosure I had to constantly go into my system hardware maintenance, uninstall and t hen re-install the USB mass storage device.

So the only ''fix'' was changing the enclosure and then making sure to only boot up the external drive enclosure after my system had finished startup.

Hope this helps somebody!

I have had a similar situation recently...
I had a customer with a new Seagate 5gb
micro drive that did exactly the same thing.
He had not tried it on another computer though and when I arrived to look at the problem I found he had "TweakUI" by Microsoft installed. I found in the drives section of TweakUI the last drive with a checkmark was the cd rom.
I checked a couple more of the drives and his usb micro drive was found in "My Computer". Works fine now..
Just a suggestion for the future.
Many people don't know what utilities have EVEN been put ON their machine. Just one more thing to cause a problem. papawterry

I have both a mac and a pc, and I've had this problem before, too, for my pc. I think its that, if the external hard drive's formatted in certain ways, the pc might not recognize it. The only way that I know of to get the inofrmation back is to find someone that has a computer that can recognize it (a pc store, maybe?), have them back up your information to a cd or dvd, and reformat the external hard drive so that your pc hard drive can recognize it.

I ran into a similar problem when assembling an external drive, after much searching and hair pulling , I finally ran across this online.

http://johnvu.net/blog/archives/000112.php

The site seems to be gone now, but luckily I saved a copy of the text for future use. It's come in handy several times now. This is for XP, btw.


Quoted:
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The hardest and most time consuming part of getting the hard drive to work for my cousin was to initialize the drive --

Luckily, Win XP does have a partitioning program called "Diskpart." You have to run this program at the command prompt.

To get to the command prompt you do the following sequences, the commands in quotes are what you have to type at the

prompt:

1. Click the Start button
2. Click the Run... option
3. Type "cmd" when prompted by the Run program. A command prompt shell should then appear.
4. In the shell, type "diskpart"
5. Now, if you haven't already done so, plug your drive into your USB port.
6. In the diskpart program, type "list disk"
7. One of the disks listed should be your external drive. To choose which drive to work on, type "select disk X" where

X is the drive number assignment -- 0 is the first assignment, 1 is the next and so on and so forth.
8. Now, here is where you need some forethought and planning. If your drive is large, it will probably perform better

if you partitioned the drive into multiple partitions. I am going to show you how to partition a 120GB hard drive into

three almost equal partitions. There also exists different types of partitions, so I will show you my convention in

partitioning a drive into 3 or more partitions. Think about how you want to partition your drive, decide and move on.
9. If you want to partition your drive into just 2 partitions, you probably could get away with creating two primary

partitions. And the command to do this in diskpart is "create partition primary size=XXXXX" where XXXXX is the size of

the partition in megabytes, so 40000 represents roughtly 40,000 MB or 40 GB. Do "create partition primary size=XXXXX"

once and then "create partition primary" once more to partition your drive into two partitions. Notice that I didn't

place a size parament on the second call since leaving it blank means that it will use whatever available space that is

left on the drive.
10. However, if you want to partition the drive into 3 or more, you would have to first create a primary partition

specifying the size of that primary partition and then create an extended partition of whatever is left. Then what you

would have to do is create logical partitions within this extended partition. For example, three 40GB partitions in a

120GB drive would mean I would do the following in diskpart:

a. "create partition primary size=40000"
b. "create partition extended"
c. "create partition logical size=40000"
d. "create partition logical"

You always have to create an extended partition first and then logical partitions within it (with size specifications

if you want) -- you cannot create logical partitions otherwise. Of course, you could probably get away with 3 primary

partitions, but I wanted you to see my convention of partitioning drives. After you're done partitioning, type "exit"

to get out of diskpart. Now you're ready for the next step.
11. The last part before getting to use your drive is to format the partitions. In Win XP, the partitions will need to

be formatted as NTFS. Be advised though, if you format as NTFS, you cannot use it in older windows machines. If backwards compatibility is a primary concern for you, you will have to format as FAT32. In Win XP, the Disk Management tool is what you use to format partitions. Make sure your drive is plugged in again.

Click the Start button --> Right

click the My Computer icon --> Right click the Manage option. Under the Storage menu item, there is an item called Disk

Management (choose it). This option will show you all the partitions in all available drives. Go ahead and highlight

and choose the partitions that was newly created. You will need to assign drive/volume letters and then format them.

It's as simple as that.
12. Once all this is done, safely remove your USB device (if attached to your USB port) remove the drive and reattach
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