[crewislife]

Hello, I'm having an issue with my external USB HDD. I recently purchased a 250GB Seagate SATA II hard drive to use as an external drive with my laptop. I got everything working great. This evening I was shutting everything down, and accidentially turned off the hard drive before the computer was finished shutting down. There was an error message saying something to the affect that the computer couldn't write a specific file.

Now when I turn everything on the computer doesn't recognize the external drive. I've unplugged the drive from the USB and reconnected it, however XP doesn't recognize that I've plugged in anything.

I'm quite stressed out here, I have vital information on the drive that I have backed up on that drive. I appreciate anyone's help!

Thanks!!!!!ray:

 

[crewislife]

Speedster123 it's not showing up in the device manager, that's what's really weird. It's like XP is not even recognizing that I've plugged anything into the USB port.

Linderman, thanks for the info. I'm going to give that a shot and see if that fixes the problems. Are there any issues with resetting the CMOS?

 

[crewislife]

Here's an update. The HDD works 100% when I plugged it into a different computer. So I think that the problem is with something on the my laptop. It's not the USB ports because they work with other things I've attached (like my USB mouse). Could it be something with XP? I've done a system restore to a point when I know everything was fine, and it still has not correct the issue. Well be attempting to reset the CMOS and see if that fixes the issue. Any other ideas would be GREATLY appreciated! Thanks to everyone who's answered thus far.

crewislife