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External USB hard drive recognized then disappears

I have a Dell 2K3 server. When I put a external USB hard drive on it I get the notification down by the clock that new hardware was found. External hard drive found. Device is ready. Then it disappears. The safely remove hardware icon shows up and disappears right away and the drive is nowhere to be seen. Am I missing a service of something?

Joseph Daly

Do you have any mapped drives on the system? Its possible that there could be an existing drive letter conflict with the USB drive. If you open up disk management you can view all active disks and if necessary change the drive letter for the usb drive.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307844

jimbecher

ASKER

Nope. Doesn't even show up under disk management ....

Joseph Daly

How about in device manager any yellow exclamation points under the usb devices? Have you tried rescanning the hardware for changes in device manager?

Joseph Daly

Tested the drive in another laptop or desktop?

jimbecher

ASKER

Not yellow exclamations. Nothing. The first thing I did was pop it on another computer. Works like a charm.

Joseph Daly

Ok long shot here but what are the drive letters you have when you go to my computer?

jimbecher

ASKER

A - Floppy
C - HD
D - HD
E - CD-Rom

This is a pretty old Dell server with a storageworks chipset. If that helps any ...

imadimad

Hi,
First put the USB Drive on other computer and format it to NTFS file system then connect it to the server 2003 and you will see the drive without problem.

Regards,

stlbridge

Jim,

Have you checked Disk Management after the drive is plugged in?

Control Panel -> Admin Tools -> Computer Managment -> Disk Managment -> Is your drive listed? Is it formatted? Is it showing at all? Perhaps it has a conflicting drive letter? Drive letters are dynamically assigned, but who knows... It's worth looking at.

What is the size of the external drive?

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jimbecher

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