External Hard Drive Not Showing Up

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Guest

I am running vista home edition. I had an external hard drive that worked
great, but did not ever run at 2.0 for the USB. Eventually the drive would
not keep a usb connection. I bought a new enclosure and the drive works great
excetp: When I plug it in "my computer" does not show the drive. I can see
the drive using disk manager but it does not give it a drive letter. It says
the disk is: Online, healthy, active, primary partition. If I right click on
the drive the only options I have are "help" and "delete volume". Is there
any way to access the drive and get access back?
 
Control Panel (Classic view) > Administrative Tools > Computer Management >
Highlight Disk Management

Disk must be partitioned, formatted and assigned a drive letter before it is
usable (use Windows Help and Support for information on partitioning and
formatting).

If the disk is already partitioned and formatted, make sure it has a drive
letter assigned to each partition.


I Bleed Blue and Gold
GO BEARS!
 
Hi,

Did you ever solve this issue? I have a USB external HD I am trying to use
in Vista. It shows up in the disk manager but no drive letter and options
are ghosted out even though it shows connected, active, healthy etc.

Additionally, it does not show in my computer and I am unable to find any
way to access the drive.

The drive is already partitioned and formatted and contains backup data so
formatting is NOT an option. The drives works perfectly when I plug it
into my other machine that is running WinXP. No matter what I do though, I
cannot get a drive letter to show in Vista nor can I access this USB drive in
any other manner.

So, did you or anyone get a fix for this problem??
 
Malakie said:
Hi,

Did you ever solve this issue? I have a USB external HD I am trying to
use
in Vista. It shows up in the disk manager but no drive letter and options
are ghosted out even though it shows connected, active, healthy etc.

Additionally, it does not show in my computer and I am unable to find any
way to access the drive.

The drive is already partitioned and formatted and contains backup data so
formatting is NOT an option. The drives works perfectly when I plug it
into my other machine that is running WinXP. No matter what I do though,
I
cannot get a drive letter to show in Vista nor can I access this USB drive
in
any other manner.

So, did you or anyone get a fix for this problem??
Click to expand...


I just tried my 300 GB USB external HD. I hadn't used it since I
transferred to Vista. It was working ok on my XP machine and it came up
just fine on my Vista machine. From I can tell searching around the net,
people with this problem are reporting that removing all the USB controller
drivers and letting them reinstall themselves on startup fixes the problem.
Bob F.
 
HI Bob,

I will give that a try.. I thought I had already done that but cannot
remember so it will not hurt to do it again.

I should have mentioned this drive is both a USB capable and IEEE capable
external drive. I get the same results whether I use USB or IEEE. All
other drives work fine. This drive is a Maxtor (now Seagate) external 80 gig
and is about 6 years old so I wonder if that has anything to do with it. The
drive itself works fine when connected via IDE direct but once back in the
enclosure, Vista does not show any icons or allow access to the drive.

Malakie
 
The age of the hdd doesn't matter but the controller in the enclosure might.
We had issues with a number of enclosures during the Vista TechBeta program.
Also, there are a number of usb fixes in Vista SP1 and one may address your
issue. These fixes in the form of hotfixes done over the past year. See:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=941600
 
Hi,

I went to download and try the hotfixes. When I execute the file, I get a
message that says "The Update does not apply to your system" and then it
exits.

Running Vista 32-bit Ultimate updated via Windows Update automatically.
Were these USB patches sent out via the Windows Update and perhaps already
installed thus the error?
 
You could check your update history to see. A lot of hotfixes are only
available through MS Product Support Services. Many of these hotfixes
required much more extensive testing for things like regression before being
made available generally on WU. They were provided by PSS to users who were
having a particular set of symtoms. They were later incorporated into SP1
and received further testing there.
 
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