I have an 80 gig external hard drive (simpletech) that is not eing recognized by My Computer. I recently got this new laptop and all my old songs from my other comp. are on this disk, so it is important to keep the files, and not format. My device manager shows an Unknown Device but i cannot figure out what to do. I have also gone through the my computer 'manage' key, and it shows an unlabeled drive, but i am unable to rename or edit the drive. please help.
Tell us what happens when you connect the external hard drive to your new rig and post any error messages here. I had a similar problem when I connected my external hard drive (and flash drives) to a friend's computer and solved it by adding a *.dll file to her operating system.
everything was working fine until one day i connected the hard drive and all that comes up is the 'safely remove hardware' deal in the bottom right corner of the screen, the drive did not show up in the 'my computer'. thats all that happens when i plug it in, besides my computer slowing down.
i have figured out that the blank drive in the 'disk management' is not my external hard drive, because the capacity is not correct.
something new i have tried is plug in my 1 gig memory chip and that works fine.. so the problem lies within the hard drive or settings on the computer; i think.
To post a screen shot of the active window, hold the Alt key and press the PrtScn key. Open the Windows PAINT application and Paste the screen shot. You can then use PAINT to trim to suit, and save it as a JPG format file. To upload it to TSG, open the full reply window and use the Manage Attachments button to upload it here.
Funny I can see the screen shot...I see a 1 gig drive and then two partitions of one C and a D recovery partition.
It might be the external chipset that does the conversion...in which case one of these will read the ide drive. Or find someone with a desktop and slave it to theirs. http://www.pccables.com/cgi-bin/ord...partno=00508&search=USB&rsite=g.usbide&rcode=
I edited the post in question to see what happened, and the screen shot is posted as a BMP. I have no idea why IE6 doesn't show me the BMP, but it doesn't. OTOH, in looking at the screen shot, I'd look in Device Manager and see what it says about the drive.
Bob, the screen shot is Disk Management, and it's not there.
Then hopefully they have their friend's computer they used before available or even one they can take to a computer store to test out. Most are willing to help.
actually i do see the drive show up for a split second every time i disconnect the drive form the computer. the drive info will flash up on the screen abd then vanish, that probably wont help anything, but heres another screen shot.
I have to agree with Bob, I'd find a system to plug this thing into. If that fails, it's probably time to remove the physical drive and test it directly connected to an IDE channel. The indications are that the USB controller is properly recognized, so if it's the external drive, I'd be thinking it's the drive itself...
i just tested the hard drive on another compute, and the same problem occurred. I opened 'my computer' after the computer automatically installed the drive, and nothing.. no drive... so there is something wrong with my external hard drive.... what should i do?... important files on hard drive, need to recover.
You probably already tried this, but run a quick check to see what the computer shows in the explorer view (rightclick start, scroll down to explorer). Next, with explorer still open, remove the usb connection and insert it into a different usb port. Depress f5 key to refresh view.
IDE ports? Perhaps the USB ports are now proven to be working.
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