External Hard Disk not being Detected (only on my machine)

Hi

I joined the forum as the activity seemed high and knowledgeable . Here is my problem.

I have an 500 Gb external hard drive (one of those slimeline jobs) and use it for backup and external storage fvrom my personal laptop.
It worked fine for ages and for a while I didn't use it (didn't need it).

When I went back to use it recently it wasn't detected by my laptop (Win 7) anymore. I can feel and hear it spinning but it is not being detected. Being somewhat technical I tried the following


- I went to my local PC hardware store and bought a new cable. They helpfully plugged it in there and it showed up straight away there.
- When I got home I plugged it into laptop and again not detected.
- I trawled around disk management and no luck in it being seen.
- We have a desktop PC in the house (running Vista) and when I plugged it in there it was seen find there as well.
- My other USB devices are not having any problem so as far as I know the ports are fine.

Any ideas as I am tearing the hair out of my head

Have you tried plugging it into a different usb port on your laptop? When it's plugged in, what does your device manager show...any yellow triangles or question marks? Is there any software/firmware to download?

Thanks for the reply. I have moved the USB to working ports and not a sniff from anywhere. I can feel the power going to it as it is reacting but that is just the physical unit.

The device manager doesn't even detect it.

kdaly100 said:

Hi

I joined the forum as the activity seemed high and knowledgeable . Here is my problem.

I have an 500 Gb external hard drive (one of those slimeline jobs) and use it for backup and external storage fvrom my personal laptop.
It worked fine for ages and for a while I didn't use it (didn't need it).

When I went back to use it recently it wasn't detected by my laptop (Win 7) anymore. I can feel and hear it spinning but it is not being detected. Being somewhat technical I tried the following


- I went to my local PC hardware store and bought a new cable. They helpfully plugged it in there and it showed up straight away there.
- When I got home I plugged it into laptop and again not detected.
- I trawled around disk management and no luck in it being seen.
- We have a desktop PC in the house (running Vista) and when I plugged it in there it was seen find there as well.
- My other USB devices are not having any problem so as far as I know the ports are fine.

Any ideas as I am tearing the hair out of my head

Try using a powered USB hub. Sounds like your laptop does not have enough power to spin the drive.

Well I found out what the issue was from a related problem. I was finding that my laptop was really suffering from bad overheating and I brought it to a local PC repair shop. They opened iut up and cleaned out some pretty hard core gunk whch was hitting the overall performance I guess and once this was done I was back in action and it detected the USB Hard drive right away.

Clearly it was not enough power going to the USB....

Kieran