I have a brand new dell laptop. It has vista. My old computer was XP
and I am trying to move over some certain files, (music and pictures)
from the external hard drive to the vista system. I plugged in the EXT
HD and vista accepted it without any problems. It shows up with the
correct name in the USB device list but for the life of me it will not
show up in "my computer"
I have completed windows update......
Maxtor says, "We can't help you with this issue"
Please help me if you can!
I feel your pain...
For example I have a perfectly good Seagate SATA drive, if I install
it ALONE as an Internal Vista sees it. If I install a second SATA
drive unless I humble it down to IDE mode Vista won't see it. If I
take the same drive and put it in a external case again Vista won't
see it, this time not even if it is alone unless I disable the SATA
connector and plug it in using USB 2.0. I've seen simular issues in XP
where Windows is too dumb to see a external drive regardless how it is
connected, it will show as 0 bytes and won't be accepted unless you
reformat. The same drive placed in another Windows box runs perfectly.
Go Figure.
USB devices can at times be a pain in the butt. Try this:
Shutdown. Turn off your external drive (assuming it has an exteranl
power source). Now leave it off. Reboot your laptop. Wait till Windows
comes up and it settles down. Now turn on your external drive, then
wait a few seconds and only now plug in the USB cable into your
laptop. In a couple seconds or less you should hear a audio cue and
Windows should respond probably with autorun or some menu showing your
drive.
Now I'm a old hand with Maxtor external drives. If yours is more than
a year old and you still can't get it to work, you may wish to do what
I did years back.
While it will void the warranty if you can't get your data and Maxtor
won't help, just carefully open the case. Depending on model it can be
a little tricky. Once you do, you'll see a plain vanilla IDE drive
inside. It should be just pushed onto a very cheesy, very little
circuit card not much bigger then a matchbook. Carefully remove the
power connector and wiggle the drive free from the circut card. It
should only take slight effort. Do NOT use brute force. Now how you
proceed next depends on how valiable your data is.
I would simply take the now free drive and attach it to a IDE cable
and plug it into another computer, then see if the drive itself is ok,
which it probably is, then copy your data. Now that it on a different
system, since you laptop probably doesn't have a easy means to connect
to the outside word, it would probably be worth your while to pick up
something like LapLink that comes with a set of cables and software
that makes it a easy job to transfer files back and forth from one
computer to another.
What went wrong? Probably not Windows this time. What failed is the
little circuit card in the Maxtor external. All the stress the cheap
card gets when you plug in and yank out the connector sooner or later
damages this circuit card unless you are always exceedingly gentle.
You'll find all kinds of horor stories on the web about the Maxtor
external early models, even Maxtor admitted as much.
