Thread: External Hard Drive will not instal

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

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

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