I have a friend who has a problem with her external hard drive not being recognized when she connects to the USB port of her computer. The drive has its own driver which works with XP and Vista, and since I don't use external drives, I cannot help her. Does anyone have any knowledge of why this might be happening ? Appreciate any help, Thanks in advance.

A bit more of info would, such as her OS? Since it works under XP and Vista, I take that she is trying W7?

We have a thread here that might be related?

http://www.notebookforums.com/post31...ml#post3102074

cheers ...

There could be a number of issues wrong with this.
If it is a Windows machine and your hard drive is not coming up do this.
Diagnostic help 1:
1.) Right Click on MyComputer and choose manage
2.) Go To Device Manager
3.) Scroll down to see if there are any (!) marks next to anything.
4.) Report back with what you see there

Diagnostic Help 2:
If you are running on a laptop that is not plugged in your hard drive may be drawing too much power for the USB to provide to power up. Try plugging it in

Diagnostic Help 3:
Her Laptop may be running a USB 1.1. The device you are trying to plug in is USB 2.0. While it is backwards compatable you may experience issues with the hard drive BIOS trying to install drivers that are incompatable.

Diagnostic Help 4:
She is running on a computer that is not her own and the administrator of the computer has a group policy that prohibits USB devices.

Diagnostic Help 5:
She has plugged in the device but the drive is trying to access a reserved letter that is already in use. This happens from time to time with Windows where you can plug in one device and it will take a drive letter (Say E: for example). You remove said device and plug in a new USB Key. This is now E:. You then plug the old hard drive in and the bios on that old hard drive wants to be E, however since this is reserved it does not ask for a new drive letter assignment but waits there.

You can check to see if the drive shows up from your device manager and then manually reassign it to a new drive letter. This would happen in XP machines pre service pack 2.

Please let us know if you fixed this and what was the problem as I would like to know.

qhn and Darq Nemesis
Thanks for replies, I know she is running on either XP or Vista. She has borrowed the comp from a friend because her computer is currently with a technician. She has already transferred stuff from the borrowed computer to the external drive, so it must have been recognized at that point. Anyway, I will have to check with her again about this, and since she is living in Ghana at the moment, and they are always having power outages over there I don't know when that will be, but I will keep u updated on this, and thanks very much for your help. Greatly appreciated !

Tgbrindley, did you ever solve this problem?

Not yet as they are having power cuts every night in Ghana, and I don't have much contact with her, and when I do we usually talk about other things, but will give some feedback, whenever I can get some more info, Thanks