Connecting an External Drive

[cincibuck]

About a year and a half ago I found a Fantom Drive, 250GB hard drive. I installed a usb 2 hub in my PC, plugged the drive in and it worked... sort of. I needed to reboot it often sometime more than once a week. Finally it went out and I couldn't get it to reboot. I discovered the power pack was kaput, so I bought a new power pack, plugged it in and the power light came back on but I've been unable to reconnect with the PC. I've tried using other ports. I've put a flash drive on the port in question and it worked. I tried a different usb cord, nothing. I've gone into control panel and tried to install new hardware and the explorer keeps telling me it can't find any new hardware. Any ideas? I'd really like to get the unit working again as I put several prgrams on it and it is also where I store OSU games and movies.

 

[sandgk]

Do you have a spare drive bay internally in your computer?

Most USB hard case drives like the Fantom have a regular hard drive inside. You can take it out and install the drive in the computer. If it mounts then you know nothing is intrinsically wrong with the hard drive itself. Plus, if it does mount I'd start burning all the data to DVD for archiving.

If the drive does not mount then it may be time to kiss that archive good-bye. There are data recovery tools of course, some that are actually worth their weight, others not so good.

Either way, I'd try the internal mount of the actual hard drive first.

 

[Dryden]

Two Qs:

Are you using a USB 2.0 rated cable? If you are, you should not need external power.

Did you ever plug the drive into another PC or OS which may have rewritten partition/device identifiers?

I've been through the same thing you're experiencing ... external drive works fine, then one day I plugged it into a Vista PC, and now my XP machine doesn't even recognize the drive at all, not even with an "Add New Hardware" popup. It's like it's dead when on the XP PC, but if I plug it into my Vista desktop, it fires right up. I still haven't solved why it's doing this.

 

[cincibuck]

Two Qs:

Are you using a USB 2.0 rated cable? If you are, you should not need external power.

Did you ever plug the drive into another PC or OS which may have rewritten partition/device identifiers?

I've been through the same thing you're experiencing ... external drive works fine, then one day I plugged it into a Vista PC, and now my XP machine doesn't even recognize the drive at all, not even with an "Add New Hardware" popup. It's like it's dead when on the XP PC, but if I plug it into my Vista desktop, it fires right up. I still haven't solved why it's doing this.

I don't have vista on my PC or my laptop and I tried the drive on my laptop.... it couldn't find it either.... hmmmmmm, should have seen that as a "the extrenal drive is shot" issue....

 

[Dryden]

Don't know if you still need help on this or determined the drive was dead or what, but I came across something today that might help you out. When you mount an external/removable drive the system auto-assigns the next available drive letter and stores that for that device, but does not reserve the drive letter from other devices. e.g. If you disconnect a removable drive and its drive letter is later taken by another device or network drive, Windows isn't smart enough to ask you to reconcile the conflict later if you plug the original removable drive in again.

In my case, I have a 60Gb removable I mounted to my laptop as M:. I later mapped a network drive as M: at work, then spent the next month fighting my removable drive, thinking it dead, because Windows didn't seem to recognize it. Turns out it was still trying to assign it drive letter M: everytime I plugged it in, but M: was now already in use for a network share. Hence, it didn't show up in add new hardware, didn't show up in my drive listing, but didn't behave like a failed piece of hardware either.

Presuming you're on XP, plug your removable drive in, wait a few minutes for Windows to do its USB auto-detect voodoo, then go to Control Panel -> Performance and Maintenance -> Administrative Tools. Open Computer Management. Click the Disk Management tree at the left, and check your resulting drive list to see if your removable drive was delegated a letter already used by the system. You can assign it a new drive letter from here to begin accessing it.