Storage forum: External hard drive not recognised. Please help :(

If so, it can hide drive letters. Look up TWEAKUI and use that to see if drive letters are hidden.

Bob

Completely shutdown?

That is, shutdown and remove all power from all devices and power bricks for a 10 count and try again?

How about plugging that into another USB port? Some discover some ports will not work, but report "OK".

Bob

You need to test the drive on another machine and if it behaves the same, time to call its maker to get it exchanged.

In closing, you may have read my statement about such devices not being a backup system...

Bob

It doesn't show in the disk management tool. The problem is not unique. Such devices fail all the time.

Again, such a device is not "backup." Don't entrust what you can't lose to a hard disk.

AND... a test is needed on another PC to call out where the issue is. I know where my bet is.

Bob

On your backup tape, CD or DVDs.

I'm not kidding.

Bob

Hi Bob,

read yourt advice to others and thought you might be able to help with my seagate 320gb...

My laptop, HP, on XP sp2, p4 HT, 1gb ram is not recognising the drive, this seems to be linked to the power light on the drive, connected via usb2.0 cable. Sometimes it is recognised but increasingly it either comes up as drive f, usually its drive f but seagate f, lately its just plain and simple f and when i try to explore it there's nothing, as the laptop tries to interrogate the drive the power light goes out for long periods, and its not done that until this current problem.

Hope that's enough to tempt you to assist, if you need more, please ask and i'll tell all...

Thanks

subsy1662

TweakUI did have the drive unchecked. Checked and after hours of trying to solve there it was. One click. Amazingly simple.

Thanks

I am not a Technician. I just played around with the hardware and everything is now working fine.
1/ I turned off my computer at the powerpoint.
2/ I attached the Maxtor II hard-drive to the USB port of the non-powered computer and turned the Maxtor on.
3/ I then turned the computer on at the powerpoint and started it up
4/ Voila! Windows recognised the 'new' hardware and I was off and running.
I can't explain how this worked I just know that it did when all else failed.

hi i need help, my externel WD 2 TB hard drive is not being recognized by my computer, and when it does you don't see anything on it, it's empty both the truth is it has about 700 gb on it, and when you check how mutch space it is still available on the hard drive, it is 0 bytes that means when you go to properties the hard drive doesn't have the name on top, and the whole capacity is blue like the hard drive is completly full, but by the used space is written 0 bytes and on free space is written 0 bytes and the capacity is 0 bytes,.
And ones it did came up that the hard drive has used space 700 gb, and ones the hard opend for like 2-3 minutes and than it closed again and than the pc will not recognize the externel hard, till i plug out the power from the hard drive wait a couple of minutes and than whan i plug it beck in it will recogineze it for about five minutes, both when i open it it is empty, both i know that it is not empty becouse it recognized it ones for 2 minutes and i saw that the info is still in their, I tryed changing the usb port it didn't help, booting the pc, uninstalling the hub and reinstall it, power out power on, again changing pc, so if somebody could help me out please do thanks

When i originally hooked up my HDD it worked, but after a few hours it stopped working, it is seen in my device manager as fine, but not viewable in the disk management, and i can see it in my computer but it will not allow me to create anything on the drive, it says something about file not specified. this is on an XP machine where i already have a WD 500GB HDD working fine attached via usb also, i have hooked it to my vista machine and it worked fine, but when i bring it back to my XP machine nothing, now i have tried reformatting with vista, have uninstalled all my usb ports and also reinstalled my chipset, anyone have any other ideas of what i can try. my last resort will be to install it into my machine and give up on the external case but this will defeat the purpose of why i purchased it, please help

I disconnected the Maxtor and tried it again and it failed to work. So in the meantime I found an alternative power supply lead, plugged it into the maxtor and it is now being recognised by windows. It would seem that in my circumstance the problem was power related. Good Luck

I have many levels of backup. Sadly it does take time to do this so I fit it inbetween and as part of my PC usage.

1. CDRW/DVDRW disks contain a set of what I need to move to a new machine. NO OS or applications are needed since I have the install CDs plus those have a copy.

A total of 3 sets are rotated and as some media fails, it gets replaced. This is cheap compared to just a few years ago.

2. Next in line is an USB hard disk. Nice for quick backups that I don't want or need to refresh that DVDRW set (I used to use CDRW, but DVDRW is just so many less disks.)

3. A smaller set of files is sent off to my mini-server that is running OpenSSH or a secure shell server. This contains my core works that I can't lose and photos.

4. Further down the list are my set of OS CDs, applications CDs. All the originals and CDKEYS are in a package far away from the computers. A copy of these are in my recovery kit. I use my recovery kit first and if one of these CDRs fail, I can go get the original to duplicate it again and refresh the recovery. This happened once so the system works.

5. The take it with me plan. I recently acquired an 1 GB USB memory key. On it are the items that I don't want to lose if I was away from home and the home vanished. While I can't carry my photos there, key works and such are on it.

Some may consider this extreme but they may not have suffered a total wipeout yet. Or watched others lose it all.

Bob

Had the same problem with a generic USB drive case from TigerDirect with an old WD hard drive inside it. It was being recognized only intermittently which was making me crazy. Some days XP saw it, some days no.

Removing the USB connector from the USB hub, and then putting it into a new different port on the hub did not help the computer recognize the external USB drive.

But disconnecting the external drive from its power supply, and then disconnecting and reconnecting the USB cable at the external drive (with the computer on) led to XP SP2 seeing it and assigning a drive letter in Explorer. I dont remember if I reconnected the power supply or the USB cable at the external drive first, but it was nice to see it back in action.

I am having the same problem with a LaCie 250 gig drive. It does seem to be related to SP2.

Just to take this to another level of weirdness, Mac OSX mounts this same drive and regognizes the files eventhough it can't do anything with them as they were written on a Windows PC

Use USB 2.0 on the PC and Firewire on the Apple for hard disks. It's a small lesson, but so far the lesson seems to be repeating too often.

And yes, it should work but after dozens of failures why should I try to fix an apparent industry issue?

Bob