External USB HDD

[big_b]

Just been tryring to get a 1Tb external usb2 hdd to work on a Laptop.

Plug it into my pc with xphome & it reads ti as a local disk.

Plug it into the laptop with vista home premium & all we gety is device not recognised.

Any ideas
Dave

 

[whitepass]

Maybe a missing USB driver or something the laptop maker put in.

 

[SuperFudd]

I have one that won't work on this computer but works fine at work. Perhaps a power problem. I won't worry about it until I get a new computer "soon".

 

[mjolnir]

Just been tryring to get a 1Tb external usb2 hdd to work on a Laptop.

Plug it into my pc with xphome & it reads ti as a local disk.

Plug it into the laptop with vista home premium & all we gety is device not recognised.

Does the USB port in the laptop work with other devices--flash drives, or cameras, or....?

What do you see if you open the Vista equivalent of the Device manager? Is there a warning icon someplace?

Have you tried plugging in the USB drive both before turning on the laptop, and after the unit is up and running?

Have you contacted technical support of the drive manufacturer?

If you've done all that, have you consulted technical support of the manufacturer of the laptop?

ns

 

[trainmetal]

Does the 1Tb external usb2 hdd have a seperate power supply or is it powered from the USB socket on your PC / Laptop?

If it is powered from the USB socket then you may need a seperate power supply as Laptop USB sockets do not generally provide as much power as a Desktop USB socket.

 

[big_b]

Thanks for the replies the drive is now working.As there were some other issues on the laptop we reformatted & reloaded the OS. Once windows ( Vista home premium ) was backup & running we tried the drive again with the same result device not recognised.Tried safe mode & it worked.Went back into normal mode same problem.
Then about 2 hrs later turned on the laptop & it said new device found & drivers installed.It just started working like nothing had been wrong.Before & after formatting I had tried every usb device I have including other external drives & they all worked as soon as they were pluged in.
Still don't know what the problem was it just seemed to fix itself somehow.

Dave

 

[saintjimmy]

Sometimes, a device won't load until the computer is rebooted/restarted. I used to have that problem until I went into the BIOS and changed a few settings. The next time Windows loaded, all my devices worked as soon as they were plugged in! I did not reload or reformat my hard drive, I have found that if the BIOS has an option for "Plug n' Play OS" and it is disabled, nothing that is plugged when Windows is on will work until Windows is restarted. So just make sure your laptop is Plug n' Play enabled or on (or something similar).

Just my two cents...

Kyle