Question

USB Hard Drive not been detected

Asked by: obrienj

I have an generic external hard drive.   It's plug and play, and gets its power from the pc/laptop.
When I plug it into the/any computer, windows does not detect it at all.  It doesn't appear in My Computer as a drive.  It doesn't appear in Device Manager or the Disk Management utility either.  
The power light comes on and i can hear the disk spinning.

Any ideas what the problem could be?  And, as is likely, it is just  broken... is there any way to retrieve the data on it when the drive is not even recognised by the computer??

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Asked On
2008-06-16 at 02:34:59ID23487506
Tags

unkown

,

Generic USB External Hard drive

Topics

Removable Backup Media

,

Computer Hard Drives

Participating Experts
4
Points
500
Comments
10

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Answers

 

by: sirbob2000Posted on 2008-06-16 at 02:40:27ID: 21791953

Hi - What OS are you using?

 

by: obrienjPosted on 2008-06-16 at 02:48:46ID: 21792004

sorry, using Windows XP SP2

 

by: mrrooniePosted on 2008-06-16 at 04:47:01ID: 21792579

if it is broken it may just be the actual caddy thats broke so you could get the drive out of the caddy and slave it to a PC to recover your data.
have you tried connecting it to a different usb port? if the pc you are connecting to is quite old theres a chance its usb ports are usb 1 so the usb drive may not have enough power to work properly

 

by: obrienjPosted on 2008-06-16 at 04:51:07ID: 21792607

hey, ya.. have tried it on a few different machines... same result on all of them. They're all pretty new machines as well.

Okay, I presume "out of the caddy" means take off the outer casing on the drive.....
but how do I slave it to a PC?

 

by: mrrooniePosted on 2008-06-16 at 05:17:16ID: 21792800

yes, remove the outer casing. you may not be able to slave certain hard drives, but heres the generic way of doing it -

how to slave a drive - http://www.dtidata.com/resourcecenter/2007/04/23/how-to-slave-hard-drive/

 

by: mrrooniePosted on 2008-06-16 at 05:18:27ID: 21792809

an important note on slaving tho - MAKE SURE THE JUMPERS ARE AT THE CORRECT SETTING!! usually labelled on the drive as 'slave' or 'cable select' does it automatically

 

by: obrienjPosted on 2008-06-17 at 01:49:09ID: 21800945

I had a look at that, but the machine I was going to slave it to doesn't have two connectors.  I could probably find one if I looked hard enough, but I have spent more a few hours on this already.
Time is money, It will be cheaper to just drop it into a data recovery place.

thanks for the help,
j

 

by: nobusPosted on 2008-06-17 at 04:47:01ID: 21801897

for recovery, i suggest these guys :  http://www.gillware.com/      

 

by: hak583Posted on 2008-06-17 at 14:00:48ID: 21807429

try to remove the USB hub form the device manager and rescan it.

 

by: obrienjPosted on 2008-07-15 at 07:54:22ID: 31467525

hey, turned out it was the casing.  I just bought a new case for it and it works fine again.
Giving the points to mrroonie for he gave the most effort.
Cheers,
James

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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