USB HD WON'T INITIALIZE

[Guest]

I've got a 200GB external HD that I was using on my old laptop (PIII 800/ XP)
for about the past year. I just got a new laptop (Athlon 64 3200+ / XP), and
when I hook it up, everything installs, device manager says it's fine, but it
never shows up.

When I open storage manager, it shows the disk as not initialized, and
unallocated. When I try to initialize it, I get an error window that says 'An
unexpected error has occured. Check the System Event Log for more
information..'

When I check event viewer, I get this:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: LDM
Event Category: None
Event ID: 2
Date: 7/24/2006
Time: 2:31:56 AM
User: N/A
Computer:
Description:
Unspecified error (80004005).

For more information, see Help and Support Center at
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Of course when I check the online site:

We're sorry
There is no additional information about this issue in the Error and Event
Log Messages or Knowledge Base databases at this time. You can use the links
in the Support area to determine whether any additional information might be
available elsewhere

I've tried uninstalling the drivers, rebooting, all that jazz. I checked the
drive on another laptop, fine. I tried a thumbdrive on the USB ports, fine.
Why does this laptop hate this drive?

 

[paulmd]

If you don't have at least XP Service pack 1 installed, you cannot see
drives bigger than 137 GB. If you put SP2 on the laptop, you should be
able to see your dirve.

http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/faq/137_winxp.html

 

[Guest]

I should have mentioned this is Win XP SP2 with all the latest patches and
drivers.

 

[Guest]

Hi letterman,

Im having exactly the same problem with a Western Digital 300 MB USB drive.

Now this is the really strange part.. on my laptop I have 4 USB ports, none
of them recginise the drive. If I plug in another 4 way USB into the laptop
then plug in the drive into the extra USB slots, it gets recognised, but it
will only run as USB 1.0 not USB 2.0, so its painfully slow. The little
bubble pops up in the system tray and even tells me its not running as fast
as it could..

Ive had similar problems before with low power, has your external drive got
extra power source or is it taking pwer from the USB port? In my case its
extrenal pwer supply, so thats not the problem..

Well please let me know if you have found a solution to this problem, its
driving me nuts..

Thanks
Paul