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obrienj

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USB Hard Drive not been detected

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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sirbob2000

Hi - What OS are you using?
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ASKER

sorry, using Windows XP SP2
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mrroonie
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ASKER

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?
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/
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
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ASKER

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
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for recovery, i suggest these guys :  http://www.gillware.com/      
try to remove the USB hub form the device manager and rescan it.
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ASKER

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