external hard drive problem

[BigfootsMonk]

Hello,

My external HDD has always been working fine. Then yesterday, when I power it up, windows beep for connecting a device would sound, and I would get the little icon on the bottom right to remove it. But the drive isn't listed under My Computers.

So I tried going to disk manager to see if it was just a mapping conflict, the drive wasn't listed there. However it is listed under device manager. Weird thing is that in disk manager, it would say "Connecting to Logical Disk Manager service" on the bottom for a good 15 minutes. And the only drive that appears after that is my C drive and my CD drives. I also tried uninstalling Power ISO to see if it would help but it did not.

If you have any advice, please tell. Thank you.

Horace

 

[Old Hippie]

I would try another enclosure or mount it internally. Hopefully it's just a bad chipset in the external enclosure.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: Old Hippie
I would try another enclosure or mount it internally. Hopefully it's just a bad chipset in the external enclosure.

That can happen. Also, try changing the cable.

 

[BigfootsMonk]

Hm......I tried the HDD with one of those IDE to USB cables and it worked. I put it back into the enclosure and it worked! But it definately sounds like this enclosure is seeing some age.

Thanks a lot everyone

 

[V00D00]

I think that has to do with the way that windows handles the external devices.

I was doing a comprehensive roundup on USB to IDE enclosures and I experienced similar issues. After a while, that kept happening in all my trials. After I rebooted, it would work again for a few times and suddently stop again.

I wouldn't blame the enlcosure, blame microsoft.

The trick I did to avoid rebooting was to go into the device manager and uninstall the usb enclosure then unplug it and plug it back in. It seemed to clear it up most of the time.

 

[Paperdoc]

You could have had a simple dirty contact. Fully functioning units, after a few years, sometimes develop a bit of corrosion in connectors, and simply unplugging and reconnecting is enough to wipe the contacts clean. Could be what happened when you removed your HDD to test, then replaced.