[rogerbid]

Hi Everyone,

I am trying to help a friend who bought a new USB Hard Drive a couple of days ago and when it was first plugged in to the PC (running XP Pro) it was immediately recognised without any problems. My friend loaded the drive with backups of her Photos and such like, but now when the USB drive is plugged in, XP will not recognise it.

There is no chime to indicate that XP has recognised the new hardware, nor is there any display of the drive in My Computer, Device Manager or Disk Management.

The drive has been brought to work and we have successfully used it on a couple of computers here, and it shows the photo files and appears to be functioning perfectly well.

The computer my friend is using it on at home has a number of USB devices attached (printer, DVD Drive, etc) and we believe the USB ports are working fine.

Can someone suggest where we can go from here, since the problem does not seem to be a faulty drive, but rather in the XP settings.

Thanks, Roger Bideleux

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The workings (and more so the "not workings") of USB seem to be a mysterious affair Roger. I have been having lots of dramas with my USB as well. I suggest that you take a look at some fo the other USB not working threads and try some of the steps described there for fixing USB troubles.

One thing that comes to mind: Does this drive have its own power source or receive power from the USB port. In the latter case it may be drawing more power than the Power Supply Unit is able to provide (even though it may have worked for a while).

Do a search for posts by Jack123 - he is (one of?) the USB expert on this forum, but hasn't been active the last few days. You will likely find some strategies for attacking the problem.

Hope this helps

Digikiwi

[digikiwi]

The workings (and more so the "not workings") of USB seem to be a mysterious affair Roger. I have been having lots of dramas with my USB as well. I suggest that you take a look at some fo the other USB not working threads and try some of the steps described there for fixing USB troubles.

One thing that comes to mind: Does this drive have its own power source or receive power from the USB port. In the latter case it may be drawing more power than the Power Supply Unit is able to provide (even though it may have worked for a while).

Do a search for posts by Jack123 - he is (one of?) the USB expert on this forum, but hasn't been active the last few days. You will likely find some strategies for attacking the problem.

Hope this helps

Digikiwi

[rogerbid]

Hi Digikiwi,

Thanks for your reply. The drive does have its own power supply and the drive can be heard spinning when it is switched on so I reckon power is not the problem.

Thanks for the suggestions - I will search other threads and see what turns up.

In the meantime, if anyone else has any suggestions I'll be delighted!

Thanks, Roger

[Neil Jones]

Unplug it and replug the USB connector to the hard drive. Occasionally Windows just doesn't see it.

I think this is a more general Windows issue - I plugged an MP3 player in, it found it, I unplugged it, it was only out for about 30 seconds, plugged it in again and had to plug and unplug it three times more before Windows could see it again.

[rogerbid]

Hi Neil,

Thanks for your reply!

It now transpires that if the drive is actually plugged in when the PC is booted, it it recognised, but once the drive is unplugged and plugged in again, it is not recognised again until the computer reboots again! Maybe the answer is to plug and unplug repeatedly. I'll suggest my friend tries this and see what happens!

It seems weird that this should be necessary (and surely after a while the connections could suffer) so if anyone has come across a solution I reckon Neil will also be pleased to hear it.

Thanks everyone, Roger

[Neil Jones]

It now transpires that if the drive is actually plugged in when the PC is booted, it it recognised, but once the drive is unplugged and plugged in again, it is not recognised again until the computer reboots again! Maybe the answer is to plug and unplug repeatedly. I'll suggest my friend tries this and see what happens!

I think one of the recent Windows updates has changed the behaviour of Windows as far as USB devices go because this was never a problem before and somewhere in the last couple of months its began to surface. One of the Windows updates has added an extra tab to MSCONFIG (Start -> Run -> msconfig) which has never been documented anywhere, for example, so I can only assume that other undocumented changes have been made to XP and implemented as part of the updates.

[happyrock]

you want to be careful ...hot swapping usb flash drives and usb hard drives if they are reading from or writing to them and you disconnect it/them you will corrupt the data at a minimum..just plug the drive in and boot..let windows find it and everything will be fine

[rogerbid]

Thanks for the info guys!