Unable to 'see' external HDD

glitch · 1 Nov 2006 at 19:48

I've been given a Maxtor OneTouch III Mini by a friend to pull off some music he's written in order to master it. However I can't see the bloody thing when I connect it to my PC. Or my other PC. Or my work laptop. Or any of the computers I've tried connecting it to...

Connect the drive and Windows (tried on both W2K and XP) recognises the device and installs drivers for it. Only it doesn't show up in My Computer, isn't listed in Disk Management and I can't directly connect to it by trying sequential drive letters from Run. Strangely Windows lists it as being connected when I want to 'Safely Remove Hardware' (Location 0) but there doesn't appear to be a drive letter attributed to it.

Short of taking the drive out of the caddy and connecting it up via an IDE cable is there anything else I can try?

Craig321 · 1 Nov 2006 at 19:52

Are you sure it isn't listed in drive management.

I had a similar problem when plugging a second hard drive into my PC, I had to assign a drive letter to it before it'd show up in 'My Computer'.

Have you checked the device manager to see if there are any probs?

glitch · 1 Nov 2006 at 19:58

100% positive it's not there. All I've got is my main drive and my two DVD drives. And Device Manager lists the drive under 'Disk Drives' and everything would appear to be working perfectly.

It's really, really weird.

Fr0dders · 1 Nov 2006 at 20:37

does it show up in device manager ?

glitch · 1 Nov 2006 at 20:53

Yup, it's listed as 'Maxtor OneTouch III USB Device' under 'Disk Drives'. Device is working properly, it's assigned to Location 0 and all would seem to be as normal.

However, the Status is Unreadable under Volume Information within Device Properties - which doesn't make any sense to me unless the HDD itself has failed. :confused: