External USB hard drive

[beerdini]

I've been working on a friend's 400GB Seagate USB hard drive and have
problems with it in XP. He tried using the drive with XP and a Mac,
which when he attached it to the Mac it tried to change the data
format to one that the Mac could use. Thats where I came in. I
backed up his data, reformatted the drive with Fat32, and restored the
data. I can see the drive on my Linux PC, his Mac, and my WinXP PC,
but when I attach it to his it doesn't work.

We get the USB sound when you attach a new device, the bubble comes up
saying a new device has been detected, then the new device is ready to
use, except no device appears in My Computer. So I decided to check
Device Manager via Manage My Computer. The drive appears properly
under Hard Drives and USB devices, but does not appear under Disk
Management. When clicking on Disk Management, it will hang and do
nothing until I remove the USB cable from the PC, then everything will
run once again. On removal of the drive, the mapped USB drive will
quickly appear then vanish once again from the available drives list.

I'm pretty confident that the issue is with his PC, since I can get it
to work on 3 other computers without issues. I'm just not sure where
to search for the problem. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the USB
and HD from Device Manager, I haven't tried completely removing the
drivers from the system yet, but any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Guest]

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk
Since you are familiar with Linux, see if the above TestDisk app might help
by writing a new MBR or repairing it (USB drive) for use from within your
friends computer..
Might be worth a try, TestDisk is GPL too..
Cheers
j;-j