External drive and laptop disaster

I recently purchased a 4GB external hard drive from Hitachi. It is a Travelstar 5400 RPM. My laptop is a Sony PCG-Z1WA running XP home. The drive worked fine for a couple of weeks. Today, I can’t access that drive. It is not even listed under my computer. When I browse and type in e: my computer freezes and the programs become none responsive. I can’t find the device on my device manager to delete and start over. I was plugging into the computer USB ports (which are low speed) but then inserted a 2.0 high speed card, to make the drive more efficient. I can’t get the drive to work whether it is plugged into the high speed ports or not. Help! Paula

 

Paula,

I guess what I would do is (via Device Mgr)disable the USB 1.1 ports, and then Remove the USB 2.0 Card (device) and reboot and let Windows find and reinstall the USB Card.

It sounds like when you added in the USB Card and tried to install it, you developed a conflict that clobbered all the USB Ports 1.1/2.0 ????

The reason I say to disable the 1.1 set is that I'm going to assume that you prefer to use the faster 2.0's, AND do not have so many devices that you can not run them off of the card's Ports.

If that is the case, then disabling the 1.1's just makes tracking down the problem easier.

 

Thank you, I will give it a try. That is about when things started going crazy, now that you mention it. Paula

 

Ok, I disabled those ports, but it didn’t seem to help. I wondered about a system restore? This is the error message I got. “Changes made drive(s) E:\ after this point cannot be reversed because the drive was either excluded from System Restore monitoring, or was turned off or removed.” Huh? Paula

 

Paula,

You ONLY disabled the 1.1 Ports...correct?

You then REMOVED the 2.0 Ports/controller et al?

And then you rebooted?

Did Windows find the New Hardware and reinstall the 2.0 Ports....succesfully?

 

Unplug ALL USB devices.
Open Device Manager.
View, Show Hidden Devices.
Uninstall all devices under USB Controllers.
Uninstall all devices under Storage Volumes. Say no to any reboot prompts until you are finished. Also, if a Storage Volume doesn't uninstall, ignore it and move to the next one.
If you have a yellow ? with unknown devices, uninstall all of the entries there as well.

When this is done, reboot TWICE.

Reconnect the USB devices and see if they're recognized properly.

 

Hmm, it looks like I am missing a parallel port driver. Could this be the problem?

 

Only if you are trying to use a device attached to the Parallel Port.

You seem to have ignored the last two Posts

 

I'm sorry! I forgot to mention that in my last post. I did uninstall the USB ports and the storage volume. I also booted twice. I saw the notes by the taskbar that the usb ports were seen and updated. I attached my external drive, but had the same response as before. Let me know what you think I ought to do next. Thanks bunches! Paula

 

Could someone give my problem another look? I'd sure appreciate it!

 

I'd try connecting the drive to a different machine. Any machine running ME/2K/XP should recognize it without any additional drivers. If it works on another machine, we'll take another pass at your machine. OTOH, if it doesn't, it may have just bit the dust.

 

ok, will do. Thanks a bunch! Paula