External USB Hard Drive Problems

I have an Acer Aspire M5641, and also have the exact same issue with USB storage devices with Windows 7 64bit RTM. I emailed Acer to see if there were new drivers to address this issue. Unfortunately they did give me an answer in regards to drivers just told me they were not to be held responsible for me changing the operating system on the PC. Their response seemed awfully defensive when all I wanted to know was if they had some more up to date drivers available. Anyone know of any drivers that may address this issue?

USed the same work around as Major Blud, thanks for the idea in your post. Dropped a PCI USB 2 card in today put all my usb harddrives on it and no more problems. Seems liek a good solution for $15 until the driver issues are resolved.

Yeah, it's working out OK since I did that too....bummer I didn't have enough slots for my gigabit NIC, but I remembered that I have a PCI Express 1x slot that wasn't being used, so I ordered a gigabit NIC for that

I installed the latest Windows 7 64-bit version of the nForce 610i drivers from Nvidia's website, and I think it may have fixed the issue for me. Has anyone else tried this?

Not even 30 seconds after posting this it stopped working

Sorry to get everyone's hopes up.

Win 7 64-bit audio driver is up in Acer's driver section. I'm guessing it's the chipset driver we need.

Been having these problems ever since i installed win7. Tried a lot of things, but it just doesnt seem to work

Anyone tried contacting Microsoft about this, since this problem seems to affect loads of people?

I solved this problem like this:
1. Disconnect all USB cables from laptop & restart Win7;
2. ShutDown Computer after restart;
3. Disconnect power AC cable from external hard drive;
4. TurnOn Computer
5. Win7 will recognize your external hard drive and advice to Scan&Fix it.
6. Click Scan&Fix (quick one).

I think that this kind of problem is related not only to external hard drives, but also for many hardware devices which are connected to USB slots of laptop.
The reason is that Laptop USB power is limited and devices stop work properly because of number of reasons (long cables (6m), many devices, bad connections e.t.c);
In this case WinXP needs just to restart and it works fine again. But Win7 has some problem with process terminating.
For example, when something is unsuccessful - it's impossible to end that process in task manager and to terminate this process Win7 has to be restarted. In evidence of that problem (process termination) the Computer Management (including Device Manager, Storage e.t.c) freezes. And probably on this stage of freezing some mistakes appear on that hard drive which becomes to work inappropriately until power disconnecting. And from this stage windows unable to recognise the device, because the device is working inappropriate.

Sources and Evidences of problem:
1. Insufficient amount of USB power
2. Win7 process terminating problem (freeze)
3. Making a mistake on USB HDD
4. Unable to recognise USB HDD because of inappropriate work util power off HDD

Well, it is just my theory and if I'm not right- please, let me know because it is interesting (why Microsoft didn't recognize that problem). :)
But, anyway I think Microsoft should fix the Win7 Process Terminating problem (in Task Manager).

Although this may have fixed the issue in your particular scenario, I don't think that power is the root cause of the problem, and here's why:

1) The problem isn't isolated to laptops (I have a desktop with a 750 WT PSU).
2) I didn't have this problem with 32-bit Vista, and I haven't seen anyone on here state that they are seeing the issue with 32-bit Windows 7....it appears to be solely x64.
3) I don't have the problem when using a PCI USB card that isnt' being controlled by the Nvidia chipset. If it were a power issue, I'd be having the problem with this card also. (?)
4) I've tried all the steps in your post to no avail.

I really feel that this is driver issue.....if it wasn't we'd be seeing a lot more people having this problem.....so far it only appears to be people with Nvidia chipsets and Windows 7 x64. If it were being caused by lack of power, I'd imagine that this would be a lot more common place.