USB External Drive Not Recognized - Help!
 

Love the forum.

Question for the group I have an Iomega 250 GB External Hard disk that I use to back up the different computers in house plus store movies and music.

About a week ago I plugged it in, the drive immediately started to spin up as normal but Windows (XP) popped up an error that USB device was not recognized and unusable. Tried it on another machine and got same result. Waited a week and still unusable.

Any ideas?

The info isn;t ritical as none of the hard drives have crashed but there is a lot of back ups from old work computers plus music and movies not elsewhere.

Thanks

tried a different cable?

Have you tried a different computer, or even a different port. Could be a power issue.

The drive could have worked loose in the case, if you can't get it to work open the case and unplug it and slide it back in and try again.

And if that doesn't do it the likely culprit is the controller in the case. The drive likely would still work put in another controller.

I have a friend that had something similar to this - turns out the plug to the external case was in backwards - yes it allowed it to go in backwards!

Hope it is something as simple as this.

E

This has happened to me a few times with my Iomega 1GB via USB. But it becomes unrecognized after being used and then just sitting a few days, coming in and out of a full PC hibernation. Rebooting the drive fixes it.

Try this for yours. Unplug all USB devices. Go into device manager and delete all the USB ports underneath the USB controller tree. They are called 'USB root hub.'

Reboot the PC and plug in the other USB devices and let it rediscover them. Plug in the Iomega and see if it is rediscovered. If not, does it have a firewire port too -- mine does. Try it.

Otherwise, it may be loose or the box may be gone. Cheap external cases are available everywhere - or mount it inside the PC.

If the external drive was disconnected from the system,while the computer was on, WITHOUT using the "Safely Remove Hardware" option,it is possible the drive has been corrupted and will have to be reformatted. Sometimes you will get a message from Windows asking if you want to format the drive(that is the clue to the problem).

But, he can't see the disk at all. You have to see it to (re)format it.

And, if he could see it, I would do a scandisk and repair before a reformat.

I just had a similar problem with my wife's computer.

Pay attention to Post #7 as that is what I did and it worked.

Good Luck!

Ray