Can not see an external hard drive

[Hank]

I am trying to help a friend that had a serious problem with his PC.
He is running WindowsXP SP3. Recently he had a serious problem that
seemed like something wiped out his communications links so he could
not get on the internet. He got DELL to help him get connected (they
charged him an arm and a leg to do it). He is not very computer
literate (hey does not know a thing). Tried to get him to run a backup
with Acronis but can not see his external hard drive to store it. When
I open his hardware list the drive is listed. I can see when he plugs
it in or removes it. However I do not see the icon in the sys tray to
show drive is connected. I also can not see it when I open Acronis.
Any idea how this happens and what I might do to fix it? Does he need
to re-install something or what? There are no yellow flags on his
hardware list. Everything seems to be working but just can not see the
external drive.

email response not expected but to respond remove .uk at end
TIA
Hank

 

[pjp]

I am trying to help a friend that had a serious problem with his PC.
He is running WindowsXP SP3. Recently he had a serious problem that
seemed like something wiped out his communications links so he could
not get on the internet. He got DELL to help him get connected (they
charged him an arm and a leg to do it). He is not very computer
literate (hey does not know a thing). Tried to get him to run a backup
with Acronis but can not see his external hard drive to store it. When
I open his hardware list the drive is listed. I can see when he plugs
it in or removes it. However I do not see the icon in the sys tray to
show drive is connected. I also can not see it when I open Acronis.
Any idea how this happens and what I might do to fix it? Does he need
to re-install something or what? There are no yellow flags on his
hardware list. Everything seems to be working but just can not see the
external drive.

email response not expected but to respond remove .uk at end
TIA
Hank

Does the drive show up in "My Computer" as a disk drive? If so, does it also
show up under device manager as a disk drive? If not, does a usb entry show
up to indicate it does see "something"? Does seomthing like a thumbdrive
shop up using same connection?

Only thing I can add is that I use an external that you can swap in/out
various hard disks and somtimes one refuses to get a drive letter or show
under disk drives but there's an entry under usb. It's always been because
the drive had a problem, e.g. pushed into case pin in last case

 

[Tester]

If the computer is relatively old with USB port version 1.0 or 1.2 and
your HD is for version 2.0 then it takes time for the PC to recognize
the HD. This is my experience on my PIII systems. It does eventually
show up and you need to be patient about this. It takes about 5 minutes.

hth

 

[Tecknomage]

I am trying to help a friend that had a serious problem with his PC.
He is running WindowsXP SP3. Recently he had a serious problem that
seemed like something wiped out his communications links so he could
not get on the internet. He got DELL to help him get connected (they
charged him an arm and a leg to do it). He is not very computer
literate (hey does not know a thing). Tried to get him to run a backup
with Acronis but can not see his external hard drive to store it. When
I open his hardware list the drive is listed. I can see when he plugs
it in or removes it. However I do not see the icon in the sys tray to
show drive is connected. I also can not see it when I open Acronis.
Any idea how this happens and what I might do to fix it? Does he need
to re-install something or what? There are no yellow flags on his
hardware list. Everything seems to be working but just can not see the
external drive.

email response not expected but to respond remove .uk at end
TIA
Hank

You did not state what type of External Hard drive (USB or FireWire)
which MAY have helped. Also, you don't state what type of hard drive
the system uses, if it's an SATA RAID drive that makes a big
difference.


He may want to try O&O DiskImage
(the below link should be one line)
http://www.oo-software.com/home/en/products/oodiskimage/index.html

You download an ISO file, write it to a CD. Then you can boot to it
and run the ENTIRE utility (Create AND Recover a backup image).

It DOES see External Hard Drives (USB & FireWire, I have both).

I use it to backup my C: & D: drives monthly, and HD0 (has C: & D
quarterly (form the boot CD) to my USB External Hard drive. That way
there is NO files-in-use problems.

SIDE NOTE: When you use O&O DiskImage boot CD, make sure you
"[X] Keep Local Time," this will keep your system's CMOS time
unchanged.

You only need to install O&O DiskImage on your system if you want to
use the feature to mount an image (backup file) as a drive so you can
recover individual files/folders.


I changed to O&O from Acronis because EXACT same problem your friend
had, also I could NEVER get the image-verify to work.

No such problem with O&O, you do have to *enable verification* when
you create an image.

O&O has saved my WinXP Pro SP3 system from BSoD crashes twice in
several years past, simply booted to O&O CD and recovered C: