External drive not recognized

[BillW]

My daughter has a WD external drive that has been connected via USB 2.0 to
her PC for over a year. About a week ago, the drive (F) disappeared from
her My Computer list. A couple of simple attempts such as power off and
power on the drive brought it back. I thought the "problem" was solved.
Today it happened again. I deleted the drive entry in device
manager/hardware and plugging the device in again brought it back and we
could see it again in her My Computer list. She bought a new Seagate
external drive to use it in case the WD was dieing and she was able to
install it without any problem. We didn't know it, but during the install
the new Seagate drive the WD drive disappeared again and the Seagate was
assigned the same drive letter (F). Now, the Seagate is running okay but XP
won't recognize the WD no matter what we do. If she plugs the WD into her
second computer, it comes up just fine. Can anyone point me in the right
direction so I can get both drives running on her computer? They're both
FAT32 and are connected through USB 2.0 ports. She's running an up to date
XP SP2. Thanks for your help.

 

[Juan Perez]

Hi:

According with my experience, this kind of problem could be related to a
lack of power throught the USB ports. You can try to disconnect all the USB
devices you have in the computer before use the HD. Also there is a special
USB cable with two conectors, that offers more power to the device,
something like this:

http://earthlingsoft.net/ssp/blog/2006/03/double_usb_cable

I hope it helps.