[quarantine]

Hi, I have an external hard drive I am trying to hook up to my computer via USB cable. I plug it in, but nothing happens. I just reinstalled windows XP Pro, so I might be missing some drivers? I'm not exactly sure.

Any advice wold be dandy!

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Hello quarantine and welcome to Geeks To Go.

Lets see if I can get some information before I proceed. Normally all usb devices are plug and play and yes this includes external hard drives, however I have seen with some external hard drives that they need to be activated (putting a partition on) before use. Lets start with the most basic and see if we have any drivers missing first, to do that we need to access the device manager.

Please select start and goto run, in the run box enter devmgmt.msc and press enter.

Are any yellow marks presant in the device mananger? If so please lets me know, also check where it says Universal Serial Bus controllers

For this next step make sure the external hard drive is connected and powered on (if applicable) to the machine. When this is on please right click My Computer and select Manage. You will see alot of options on the left here, please select disk management.

Does your external hard drive show up here? if so please right click the drive and select activate and then follow the on screen instructions. After that perform a quick format and you should be good to go.

If you have any problems let us know and please reply with any information I have asked for.

Regards

Edited by wizzy2k5, 17 January 2009 - 06:10 PM.

[wizzy2k5]

Hello quarantine and welcome to Geeks To Go.

Lets see if I can get some information before I proceed. Normally all usb devices are plug and play and yes this includes external hard drives, however I have seen with some external hard drives that they need to be activated (putting a partition on) before use. Lets start with the most basic and see if we have any drivers missing first, to do that we need to access the device manager.

Please select start and goto run, in the run box enter devmgmt.msc and press enter.

Are any yellow marks presant in the device mananger? If so please lets me know, also check where it says Universal Serial Bus controllers

For this next step make sure the external hard drive is connected and powered on (if applicable) to the machine. When this is on please right click My Computer and select Manage. You will see alot of options on the left here, please select disk management.

Does your external hard drive show up here? if so please right click the drive and select activate and then follow the on screen instructions. After that perform a quick format and you should be good to go.

If you have any problems let us know and please reply with any information I have asked for.

Regards

Edited by wizzy2k5, 17 January 2009 - 06:10 PM.