Hi there,

I have an Acer Aspire 5610 laptop. Windows died recently and if I use the Acer recovery program I will lose the contents of my hard drives - something I am very keen to avoid. So I got my hands on a Windows XP Pro CD and have installed Windows. The problem is now I cannot for the life of me get it to recognize my Maxtor USB external hard drive. I've installed every little thing I can find on the Acer/Intel/Microsoft/Maxtor websites etc but still nothing. I've tried uninstalling the USB ports and reinstalling them - still nothing. I've checked device manager to see if it's recognized but not mapping correctly - it's not in device manager. I went into my BIOS to ensure that USB was enabled and it's not an option in the menu (I have PhoenixBIOS). I have tested the External Hard Drive on other PC's and it works fine. When I plug it into my notebook it plays the sound to say it's recognized a USB input and then the USB symbol displays in the Task Bar with the Message "Device Not Recognized" - what can I do to get this to work - I've spent 26 hours so far and nothing has worked and it would take me forever to back 120GB onto DVDs! Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

If you have other usb ports, have you tried them?
Have you tried other usb devices in the port? such as a flash disk.
Do you have any red or yellow errors showing in device manager?
Are all the updates applied?

I have 4 ports and have tried them all, my USB mouse works in all 4, won't recognize my hard drive in any of them.
Two yellow errors - one a modem and the other an ethernet connection - nothing else and my external hard drive isn't listed in Storage in device manager.
I've applied all the updates I can find, but still nothing. It's been a frustrating process that's for sure!