Whats wrong with my external HDD??

timberflake

I have an enternal USB 2.0 HDD. Its always worked fine, but I recently took it round a friends house to help set up his new Vista laptop (I'm running Windows XP SP2). Ever since I've brought it home, I can't get my PC to find the HDD! I've checked its plugged in correctly, even swapped which USB port it was plugged into but nothing works. When I turn the HDD on, it whirls away, but the PC doen't make that "Bing Bong" noise to confirm that its recognised it. Any ideas on what could be causing the problem and a possible solution?

fwor

In my experience, the external caddies don't seem to be very well made. I've investigated 3 failed ones: In 2 cases the USB interface electronics just seemed to have died (possibly not adequately protected against static damage), and in the third the USB cable was faulty.

Fortunately in each case the HDD was unharmed, so no data was lost.

If you try another cable you might be lucky...

mdbarber

Check in "device manager" to see if the system is recognizing any attachment at all, or even if there are any usb entries there, see if its there as an unknown device
any software scanning the usb ports?, some printer/scanner software does and can conflict
and you can try disconnecting the drive from the caddie and plugging in see if its a failed hdd
not much else apart from obviously try it on another system but be careful i haven't kept up with viral technology recently but older types of virus used to pass from disk to disk