External Hard Drive will not instal

[101RRS]

I just replaced the 40gig hard drive in my laptop with a 160gig drive and I thought I would use the old drive as an external drive in an enclosure. All set up and works fine - I am keeping all my MP3s on it.

It works OK on my laptop (XP Home) and on my work laptop (XP Professional) however it will not work on my home desktop - XP Professional.

The system detects the external drive and goes to the instal hardware menu but says it cannot find any drivers (none are needed for XP) and will not install and the drive does not show up on windows explorer.

Any ideas on how to use this drive on my desktop noting that it works on every other computer I have tried it on.

Thanks

Garry

[HangOver]

more of a hit n hope than anything else but try uninstalling/reinstalling the USB drivers for your motherboard

[Bushie]

Check that the drive letter it wants to use hasn't already been assigned to something else - I seem to recall having that problem with a USB stick a while ago

If I remember it was control panel|admin toos|Computer management|Disk management, you can then set the drive letter.

Theres a quicker way into it which I can't remember.

Martyn

[101RRS]

Thanks for the advice - tried both and neither worked.

I have another external drive that I use for backups which has a standard size drive so needs an external power source - it works OK so I swapped the hard drives around and it worked OK.

As a I result I investigated further and thought it might be a power issue as the notebook drive does not need external power and runs through the USB port. The laptop drive enclosure does have the ability to have 5v external power from another usb port and when I applied this it worked - when the external power was removed it continued to operate but will not run up on usb port power alone so power from the one usb port is marginal.

As this drive works OK on USB power on other computers I can only assume that my 3yo motherboard is able to provide the correct voltages but not enough power to start up the drive. Now that I have identified the issue I will just use the additional power cable when I need to use the drive on this computer.

Thanks for you ideas

Garry

[5teve]

i had this on an old laptop, i had to actually physically point it at the windows mass storage driver (usbstor.sys i think it was) and any additional drivers that was required, i did it mainly by guesswork but i had the issue with usb sticks camera's etc... anything that was a usb mass storage device. never did get to the bottom of it and then the laptop packed up! not that it was related.

i think something gets screwed in windows and the auto install of the usb drivers doesnt happen... it should be recoverable tho.. especially as you can use you other computers to check which drivers are required.

Thanks

Steve