External Hard Drive Not Being Recognised

[thatdavieguy]

Hi,

I've been using a 1TB iOmega external hard drive with my laptop for about a month and a few days ago it stopped working and isn't being recognised, the power light comes on when i connect the usb cable to the laptop but there is no noise from the hard drive at all and it doesn't show in disk management.

I took it into work with me and connected to my work PC (which runs XP) and it works fine, also tried it on another laptop which is running Vista and it doesn't work.

any ideas? Laptop is an HP Pavilion DV6

 

[play2mefish]

The first thing that comes to my mind is, does this external hdd have its own powersupply or does it receive its power from the USB ports only?

If it has its own powersupply, check with iOmega: https://iomega-na-en.custhelp.com/app/home and see if your hdd requires drivers for Windows 7. In years past, iOmega required drivers for all of its stuff whereas other products you could just plug into the usb and they would work.

If it receives its power from the USB ports, try to use a cable that has two ends for the USB ports, it could be just a lack of power. I have 1 TB (not iomega) that would not work from my front USB ports but will work from the rear USB ports of my desktop.

Let me know how this turns out for ya...

 

[thatdavieguy]

The first thing that comes to my mind is, does this external hdd have its own powersupply or does it receive its power from the USB ports only?

If it has its own powersupply, check with iOmega: https://iomega-na-en.custhelp.com/app/home and see if your hdd requires drivers for Windows 7. In years past, iOmega required drivers for all of its stuff whereas other products you could just plug into the usb and they would work.

If it receives its power from the USB ports, try to use a cable that has two ends for the USB ports, it could be just a lack of power. I have 1 TB (not iomega) that would not work from my front USB ports but will work from the rear USB ports of my desktop.

Let me know how this turns out for ya...

It has its own power supply, i've checked on the iomega site and they say that all of their drivers are covered by windows 7.

I went through some of their steps that they detail for support on undetected drives and it mentions about IRQ conflicts, i looked at that and there are lots of things assigned to the same IRQ on a few different numbers - i'm not sure on trying this yet as i'm worried that something major will stop working.

 

[play2mefish]

I think you will have to do wht iOmega is telling you to do to resolve your issue. The first thing I would is to create a System Restore point FIRST, and then try the things that iOmega is telling you to try.

Also, before you go to much further, I would check with your system manufacture and see if there is a BIOS update available for your machine. A lot of times a simple BIOS update will resolve issues like these. Let me know how it turns out...

 

[thatdavieguy]

I updated the bios yesterday with no success so its looking like 1 of 2 options, try the IRQ conflicts or reinstall windows

 

[Zoloft]

I believe this has something to do with the windows updates around February 9th. My Western Digital 1TB drive suddenly stopped being recognized after the updates I installed on that day. Had the same issue, works fine on an XP machine. So basically, all I am in the process of doing, using the XP machine to transfer the files from the WD drive to a different one, and when I am done, I am going to try to reformat the WD and see if it gets recognized now. I suspect MS did something odd to the drivers with one of those Feb 9 updates. If you don't have a way to transfer the data, try uninstalling the Feb 9th updates, and see if that helps.