Hi,
I have a external HHD attached to my PC . Its a USB buffalo disk. Been working great and has my Itunes media on it for months. Recently I detached it and attached it to a XP PC and later to a Win7 Laptop (which had its own external HDD) . In both cases the drive was fine and I was able to access the data I needed.
That was until i attached back to its original Win 7 PC.
The drive is there correctly under device manager - and i have tried the disable/enable trick in device manager but to no avail.
When connecting it back to the other machines its there again..
What Can I do - cannot reformat it because of the data loss ..
Any ideas?
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External drive not recogized But it Ok in another PC?
15th Jan
Clarifications
Does it show up in Disk Management on the original computer, or does it just show as a USB device in Device Manager? Have you tried it in the back USB ports? Does you other external drive work in this PC?
gechurch
15th Jan
Answers (1)
0
Votes
External drive not recogized But it Ok in another PC?
Hi, It just shows up in device manager - but with no letter or name. I have tried it in the original usb port and all the other usb ports - get same result. Yes the other external drive does work in this PC ( The win 7 one)
28th Jan
Replies
That's interesting. Normally they either work, or don't get detected as a hard drive at all. (This is where you see a USB device attached to the computer, but Disk Management doesn't show the drive. This happens when the in-built SATA-to-USB adapter stops working).
I'm not sure what's going on, but I suspect it's something a bit unusual like your laptop USB ports not providing quite enough power - perhaps the other external HDDs handle this ok, but this particular drive no longer does.
You could try adding a drive letter to the drive in Disk Management, but would be almost 100% sure that won't work since it's name doesn't show up (I guess this also means it's not detected as FAT32 / NTFS). If you were really keen you could boot from a bootable disk (Windows PE) and see if it happens from there. If it works, it's a Windows problem. If it doesn't, it's a hardware problem. If you were really really keen you could then either repair/reinstall Windows, or buy a PC card USB adapter if it's a hardware problem.
I'm sorry - I can't think of any simple/cheap fixes or things to try.
I'm not sure what's going on, but I suspect it's something a bit unusual like your laptop USB ports not providing quite enough power - perhaps the other external HDDs handle this ok, but this particular drive no longer does.
You could try adding a drive letter to the drive in Disk Management, but would be almost 100% sure that won't work since it's name doesn't show up (I guess this also means it's not detected as FAT32 / NTFS). If you were really keen you could boot from a bootable disk (Windows PE) and see if it happens from there. If it works, it's a Windows problem. If it doesn't, it's a hardware problem. If you were really really keen you could then either repair/reinstall Windows, or buy a PC card USB adapter if it's a hardware problem.
I'm sorry - I can't think of any simple/cheap fixes or things to try.
gechurch
29th Jan
