Western digital 250G external HD and Vista buisness

G

Guest

Help!
I have the misfortune to have a Sony VGN-SZ4MN/B laptop that came
pre-installed with vista buisness. This wonderful piece of equipment is
entirely useless to me as I cannot transfer any of the data from the Western
Digital HD. It doesn't even come up as recognised by the computer, I've tried
some of the suggestions from this site including the techies old faithful of
'try turning it off and then on again..' but to no avail. Vista does not even
try to regonise the HD; nothing happens when I reboot and plug the HD back
in. I don't want to system restore as I have 100gb of data on the laptop I
also need to get off...
So if anyone knows how to sort this out I'd be very grateful.
 
R

R. McCarty

Does the external drive have a AC-DC converter ? or is it a drive
that derives it's power from the USB channel's 5+Volt line ? Many
of these drives draw the maximum 500mA current available from
the USB port. When you plug in the drive to the laptop does the
WDC drive have a power indicator - if so is it illuminated ? Have
you plugged the external into another PC to verify it's operation ?
 
K

KDE

assuming..
a) other devices plugged into the USB ports are recognized.
b) the drive is readable on other computers,

I would check the format of the drive. NTFS would definitely be best
although Vista should read Fat32 with no problems. what format is the drive
?
 
M

MICHAEL

* Chutters:
Help!
I have the misfortune to have a Sony VGN-SZ4MN/B laptop that came
pre-installed with vista buisness. This wonderful piece of equipment is
entirely useless to me as I cannot transfer any of the data from the Western
Digital HD. It doesn't even come up as recognised by the computer, I've tried
some of the suggestions from this site including the techies old faithful of
'try turning it off and then on again..' but to no avail. Vista does not even
try to regonise the HD; nothing happens when I reboot and plug the HD back
in. I don't want to system restore as I have 100gb of data on the laptop I
also need to get off...
So if anyone knows how to sort this out I'd be very grateful.

Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Computer Management/
Storage/Disk Management

Can you see drive there? If you can, try assigning it a drive letter.

Three of my USB external drives are Western Digitals, they work
just fine.


-Michael
 
G

Guest

The drive doesn't show up at all. Its got its own power supply, and when
plugged into the usb nothing happens, the HD works fine with XP on my desktop
but nada with my laptop.
Cheers for the suggestions so far though.
Matt
 
M

MICHAEL

Have you had a look in your BIOS settings? Have a look for
a setting that says "Enable legacy USB support", something
close to that wording. If it's not enabled, enable it. If it is
enabled, disable it. I've seen this work different ways for
different folks. Give it a try.

Also, is the drive plugged in to a USB hub or directly into
the computer? Have you tried a different usb slot? Try
plugging it directly into the computer if you're using a hub.
Simply trying a different slot can sometimes work.

On another computer I had a usb hub and one of the slots
stopped working. The self-powered hub was getting old, so
I just bought another one. All was fine.

Have you applied all updates since getting the computer?
Especially, this one;
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...90-1204-4F94-8EE1-063071797427&displaylang=en
This is a reliability update. Install this update to resolve reliability issues with some USB
hardware devices and controllers.


-Michael

* Chutters:
 

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