External Hard Drive not Detected

HammerHead · 09 Sep 2012

paddi23 said:

Ive tried all 6 usb ports

they both run on x64

The hdd is from an old laptop in an enclosure

It says seagate momentus 5400.2

Googled it and it says it does not need any drivers so must be a windows problem

I would suspect the "enclosure". If you don't mind tinkering you can remove the drive from the enclosure and either put it in an external dock or remove the side panel on the computer and hook it direct. This would help determine what was actually at fault

paddi23 · 09 Sep 2012

It cant be the enclosure if it connects & is seen on my laptop

But as i have another enclosure, i will swap to see what happens.

paddi23 · 09 Sep 2012

As i thought all along it was a power problem.

I needed to use the Y cable for power but it needed to be connected to the mother board USB ports

Once i connected 2 of the Y usb connectors into the back of PC and one into the HDD it installed the driver and now works

Thanks to anybody who tried to help me

HammerHead · 09 Sep 2012

How is the disk partitioned/formatted? Does it need chkdsk run on it? Are the two operating systems the same?

Too late you already solved. Good!

Golden · 09 Sep 2012

Great to hear you fixed it - good job

julianzolo · 06 Apr 2015

paddi23 said:

As i thought all along it was a power problem.

I needed to use the Y cable for power but it needed to be connected to the mother board USB ports

Once i connected 2 of the Y usb connectors into the back of PC and one into the HDD it installed the driver and now works

Thanks to anybody who tried to help me

It was power in my case too, I did as you say, so I do have to thank you.
For all the other cases where the drive appears in desktop but is not recognized, it is about drivers and that stuff, in our very particular case that it didn't even appear, it was not enough power

External Hard Drive not Detected

Disk

Thank you