[ddambrosi]

I recently bought a Western Digital firewire/USB 2.0 combo drive for my Dell laptop running Windows XP Home edition. It worked fine once. When I went to use it again it would not register in "My Computer." It is recognized in device manager and no conflicts appear. There are no new/rolled back drivers available. In Disk Management in Console it appears but shows a large portion of unallocated space. Uninstalling and reinstalling does not work.

Could there be a corrupt Windows file? Does anyone have any suggestions?

[Elvandil]

If it shows unallocated space (how much?), then the drive should be partitioned and the partitions formatted.

What sizes are we talking about? Unallocated space will not appear in My Computer, but only partitions that are formatted and ready to use.

If you have TweakUI or other tweakers, be sure that the drive is not hidden from My Computer.

[ddambrosi]

111 GB of 120 is unallocated. I will try partitioning and formatting but I don't understand why it worked and showed up in "My Computer" when I first installed the drive. Thanks...Dominic

[alwrmc]

Just a possibility...I purchased an ACOMDATA external HD 3-4 months back. Installed and it worked perfectly the first time. After that it would not show up just as you described. I contacted ACOMDATA and they said that I need to turn it off when finished using it and on again when I need to access it. I can of course leave it on once I have it turned on as long as the computer itself is on and working. Since then I have had no problems. Still I find that have to turn it on each time is rather odd but I can live with that.