[camb79]

Hi

I am having a problem with my external hard drive, up until yesterday it was fine but when I have gone onto my computer today it is showing in My Computer as K:/Local Drive and when I tried to click on it nothing happened. I tried to reinstall the driver in case there was a problem with it but that seems to have made things worse.

Now the driver is gone in Device Manager and when I plug in the USB it no longer recognises it as a Buffalo Hard drive it just says USB Mass Storage Device found. When I try to install a driver for it I get the message that the software I am installing has not passed windows logo testing. If I continue with the installation it tries to install USBSTOR.SYS but then I get a message that there has been an error in the installation.

The drive does not show in disk management and in device manager the device status says Reinstall the drivers for this device. (Code 18) but if I try to reinstall I get the same problem as above.

If anyone could give any advice it would be really appreciated as I have a lot of family photos saved to this disk that I really don't want to lose.

Thanks

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I guess I have to ask the obvious... Have you tried connecting the drive to another computer to see if it will work? Also, do you have any problems with other type USB devices... ie, USB flash drives, cameras, etc?

Normally, Windows doesn't require a specific driver for USB hard drives... in which case, having it detected as a mass storage device is fine, so plugging it in to another computer shouldn't require you to install any drivers. Of course this might not apply to Buffalo drives... I haven't used them.

[makai]

I guess I have to ask the obvious... Have you tried connecting the drive to another computer to see if it will work? Also, do you have any problems with other type USB devices... ie, USB flash drives, cameras, etc?

Normally, Windows doesn't require a specific driver for USB hard drives... in which case, having it detected as a mass storage device is fine, so plugging it in to another computer shouldn't require you to install any drivers. Of course this might not apply to Buffalo drives... I haven't used them.

[camb79]

The usb works fine as I have tried a few other peripherals and they are OK, I tried the hard drive on my father-in-law's computer and although it did detect the Buffalo drive it did not show on My Computer. When I went into disk management it did detect the hard drive and said the status was healthy but I still could not access it. I am going to try and contact Buffalo support and see if they can advise of anything.

[makai]

Good idea! I hope they can remedy the situation for you. Good luck!

[carp1]

I had a cousin who had the same problem. This is caused by poor power supply that is built in to hard drive. Here is how I fixed it.

Open the external drive using flat head screwdriver and popping it open by gently tapping on the side. Once open take the hard drive out from it's casing including the power supply component. Unscrew the power supply component as well. Get a hard drive enclosure from any well known computer store and pop your hard drive in there and bingo you have your files back on. I called Buffalo tech support to see if I can replace the power supply component and they said they do not sell those seperatly.

Hope this helps.

[123Runner]

Not knowing if you have a desktop or laptop, another option to trouble shoot the problem is remove the drive from the case and attach it to a desktop as a slave drive.

If that works, then I would go with another enclosure as suggested by carp1.

[Formulator]

My friends drive had the same issue and carp1 was spot on - I opened the plastic case with an old credit card and slide the drive out, unscrewed it from the power / SATA mount and popped the drive into a PC - drive was recognised and readable thus confirming the power supply pcb is the fault. This is a bit naff on Buffalo's part.

[alexeiF]

Buffalo HD-PET640U2/R-EU external HDD not recognised

Hello. I've been having similar problems with the above drive, and found this thread which seemed helpful. I've had the drive for about a year & a half. It worked fine (on Win XP Home) up until a few days ago, when I connected it to my new laptop (Win 7).

On connecting, a warning message came up saying that Windows had detected disk errors - did I want to scan it? I said Yes, it completed the scan (no errors), but I couldn't access any of the files in Windows Explorer. I Safely Removed USB Hardware and tried again, but said No to the error scan ("Are you sure, some files may be corrupted?"). On continuing, I could see all my files.

I then selected Windows Scandisk, and once the scan completed the HDD was very slow to select. It didn't show any of my files again, and showed the following error messages whenever I tried to access it:

Local Disk (E)
You need to format the disk in drive E: before you can use it.
Do you want to format it?

Error checking
The disk check could not be performed because the disk is not formatted.
The disk check could not be performed because Windows can't access the disk.
Would you like to format the disk?

Location is not available
E:\\ is not accessible.
The volume does not contain a recognised file system.
Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted.

I have tried it on all 4 USB2 & USB3 ports, and my other Buffalo external HDDs work fine.

The HDD appears as 'Buffalo HD-PETU2 USB Device' in:

Control Panel\\Hardware and Sound\\Devices and Printers

Control Panel\\Hardware and Sound -> Device Manager

and in

Control Panel\\System and Security\\Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management

as '596.17GB RAW Online & Healthy'. My other HDDs appear as 'NTFS' or 'FAT32', not 'RAW', and I think (but am not 100% certain) that I'd formatted the problem disk to FAT32 when I bought it.

In My Computer the disk only registers as 'Local Disk (E)'.

I have tried to update Drivers but Windows says I already have the most up-to-date ones for the HDD.

I also tried reassigning the Drive Letter to (K), but no change.

This disk was the backup for my most important files when I changed to my new laptop, and so I really don't want to lose them. I've read on some sites that I can still attempt to recover the files even if I format the drive (as long as I haven't written anything new to it), but I don't want to risk that unless there's no alternative. Equally, if the power supply component for the HDD might be the problem, and opening the casing, removing the p/supply comp and running the drive in another hard drive enclosure might work (as described above), I'd rather not try it until I've exhausted other solutions.

I contacted Buffalo and they just suggested formatting it then trying to recover the files.

Does anyone have a better idea?

Thanks

Al