External Hard Drive

[brady12345]

One of our users have an external hard drive, is 250 GB Western Digital and the device on occassion is not recognized by an HP laptop running XPP SP2. Has anyone seen this problem before? I myself have never witnessed it and went through uninstalling and updating all USB Hubs, etc. and manufacturer updates recomended from HP but the user still says the external HDD at times is not recognized.

Has anyone seen anything like this or have any ideas?

 

[vacunita]

The hard drive inside might be failing, and turns off at some points, or doesn't properly come up. I would check the drive is good working order. Also that all connections are secure. It might also be a small short, inside the case.

Try removing the hard drive inside and placing it into a computer normally, does it still display the behavior if you turn on the machine? If it does, the hard drive may be failing, otherwise it might be the case is having some problems.

Place a known working hard drive inside the external case, and see if it still displays the behavior? If it does then you know its the case that has some fault.



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Ignorance is not necessarily Bliss, case in point:
Unknown has caused an Unknown Error on Unknown and must be shutdown to prevent damage to Unknown.

 

[MavenGroup]

brady12345,

Does the user always plug in the drive in the same location. My question is two fold.

1. Same USB port, etc. Sames results with all of the ports on the laptop?

2. Is he physically in the same place when the drive does not work. If this is the issue it could be because the drive is trying to use the same letter as a network resource. You may have to assign the drive a different letter that is not the same as a network share. This would be the case if the external drive works at home (when not connected to network) and does not work at the office (connected to network).

Also, when the drive does not work do you still get the Windows XP connection noise (positive - the up sounding ding).

Let us know what you find.

Thanks.

John