External Drives Not Working

[Alan]

Hi,
A problem on my sons computer a Packard Bell machine running XP, about a
year old.
When he bought this machine I transferred all of the files from his old one
using an external hard drive without any troubles. He's used a 256KB flash
drive on it from just after he bought it,
also without any problems.
However now the machine will not allow any new external drives to function.
I've tried two 1GB flash drives and a 750GB external hard drive and none of
them will work.
On connecting any of them, the balloon in the bottom left corner appears
saying 'Found new hardware, USB mass storage device' Then the new hardware
wizard starts and after a minute or so says that the new hardware could not
be installed.
I know that all three of these drives are good because they all work on
several other machines, two running XP and the other three Vista. On all of
these machines the New Hardware wizard doesn't start at all, just the
Windows dialogue box asking what you want to do with this drive.
Possibly this is a virus or suchlike, can anyone please put me on track to
resolving this? At the moment we have about 15GB of photographs and videos
of my grandson that we can't get off of this machine and we're desperate to
save them. The DVD writer also won't work correctly. It gets about three
quarters of the way through and stops leaving a corrupt DVD.
I know the information I've provided is sketchy, I know a little about these
things, not a lot.
Thanks in advance, if any relevant info is required please tell me what and
I'll provide it.
Regards,
Alan

 

[M.I.5¾]

Hi,
A problem on my sons computer a Packard Bell machine running XP, about a
year old.
When he bought this machine I transferred all of the files from his old
one using an external hard drive without any troubles. He's used a 256KB
flash drive on it from just after he bought it,
also without any problems.
However now the machine will not allow any new external drives to
function. I've tried two 1GB flash drives and a 750GB external hard drive
and none of them will work.
On connecting any of them, the balloon in the bottom left corner appears
saying 'Found new hardware, USB mass storage device' Then the new hardware
wizard starts and after a minute or so says that the new hardware could
not be installed.
I know that all three of these drives are good because they all work on
several other machines, two running XP and the other three Vista. On all
of these machines the New Hardware wizard doesn't start at all, just the
Windows dialogue box asking what you want to do with this drive.
Possibly this is a virus or suchlike, can anyone please put me on track to
resolving this? At the moment we have about 15GB of photographs and videos
of my grandson that we can't get off of this machine and we're desperate
to save them. The DVD writer also won't work correctly. It gets about
three quarters of the way through and stops leaving a corrupt DVD.
I know the information I've provided is sketchy, I know a little about
these things, not a lot.
Thanks in advance, if any relevant info is required please tell me what
and I'll provide it.

This is a known XP issue that crops up from time to time. The only solution
that I know of is to do a system restore to a time when you know this
worked.