I own a Dell C400 with a Pentium 3 and Xp Sp3 on it. My USB port was working fine until I tried to back up the system through it onto an external HDD w/enclosure, It made the back up, but there were problems with it when I tried to use it (icons disapearing) so I just reformatted it to use for storage for now. Since then the C400 won’t recognize the external HDD anymore. The port works fine with flash drives and my usb mouse, but it shows an unknown device in Device Manager, USB section, whenever I plug it (the HDD) in, and on the unknown device ‘properties’ page it says there is no driver for it anymore. I tried to uninstall using the right click context menu and then rebooting but it comes up the same. I tried a different external HDD on this USB port that also worked previously, it recognized it, but it could not start the device (as noted in device manager) anymore. I tried uninstalling this ‘Mass Storage Device’ and rebooting without removing its plug from the usb port to see if it might restore itself. In its listing on the properties page in Device Manager it said that it had to stop the device because there was something wrong with it. Both of these HDD’s are in USB 2.0 enclosures, but both enclosures are supposed to be backwards compatible with USB 1.1. They both work fine on my other Xp PC. Any ideas?
