I am experiencing the same problem as listed in other posts on this topic, but with a twist that is keeping me from resolving the problem. I have a 160gb WD USB external drive of my brother's that I'm trying to save for him, and we're experiencing all of the same symptoms as the other posts on this topic. The drive is automatically recognized when plugged in, drivers auto install, windows correctly identifies the drive and gives full drive name, device manager says it is there and operating properly etc etc, but the drive is not listed in windows explorer as others report. When I try to change the drive letter in disk management as the many other posts suggest, changing the name is not an option for this drive. My only options for the afflicted drive are "New simple volume", "New spanned volume" and "New striped volume" and of course properties. Here are a list of fixes I have tried without success.
1. Tried different USB ports and different USB cable.
2. Tried 4 different machines running Vista Ultimate SP1 (Desktop Core i7 6gb RAM), Vista Basic (Desktop Core 2 Duo, 4gb RAM), Vista Home Premium SP1 (Laptop Core 2 Duo 2gb RAM) and XP Home SP3 (Laptop Celeron 512gb RAM)
3. Stopped device with "safely remove hardware", uninstalled through device manager, rebooted with device connected.............
I have using a USB hard drive. When it's connected windows vista goes through the usual USB driver installation process without a problem, however the hard drive doesn't show up in explorer. Nor does it show up in computer management/disk management. It does show up in computer management/device manager/disk drives. Does anyone know how I can fix this problem so I can use the hard drive? I don't mind formatting it if necessary.
When I try to use explore (right click on the Start button) and drop and drag pictures from an external drive to my picture folders, the window closes, fails, and refreshes back tot he desktop. It use to work fine but for the last few months it fails. I like to choose several pictures on an external drive and simply move them to my hard drive. Can someone help or suggest a quick alternative. Thanks.
When I click on the C: drive in my explorer view I get all the subfolders. However, instead of size and date modified I get album, artist and rating info. For any individual sub folder I can right click and change the customize properties to detail view, but for the C: drive no such option is aviable. How can I change the view back to details?
I have a 1 TB external HD that is broken up into three partitions. For some reason, only two of three partitions will appear in Windows Vista. When I had it connected to my now out-of-commission desktop which ran XP, all partitions showed up and were accessible with no problem.
Can anyone offer any insight as to what's causing this and/or how to fix it? As luck would have it, my entire music library is on the one partition that won't show up, so I've been unable to access my music since my desktop has been down.
when booting up from a vista cd I accidentally had my usb external hard drive plugged in and the drive has been emptied and replaced by windows there are sintimental photos etc on the drive can anyone help me to restore them
I was starting my computer today (that has Vista), and during the start up process, a black screen came up stating that there was an error opening up my external hard drive and it was checking for errors. After it finally booted up, I went to open the hard drive files, and it was totally BLANK! I then restarted the computer, and still the hard drive is EMPTY! I had ALL my important files in there!
The ONLY thing that looks promising is that when I go to Start then to Computer, it shows the hard drive there, and it still shows that 43GB are free of 111GB of storage (same info shows by right clicking on it and going to Properties). Why would it show this if nothing is on the hard drive anymore? Is there ANYWAY to recover these files again you think???? I NEED those files!!!! Remember that the hard drive STILL PHYSICALLY WORKS. It's just that I cannot access the files on my pc at the time for some reason.......
I just bought and installed a external hard drive. I am fairly knowlegable about computers but this is my first Ex. Hard drive and know very little about there use. So what I want to know is how to save my Family Tree Makers files to it. And once I do that how do I know for sure it is opening from my new drive and not my computer C: drive? I saved it to a DVD one time but when the time came when I needed it all that was there was a short cut but no files.
I just used Windows Vista to back up my drive to an external drive. It said the backup was successful but when I went to safely remove hardware, I got this message: " Windows can't stop your Generic volume device because it is in use. Close any programs or windows that might be using the device, and then try again later. "I made sure everything was closed, checked with Task Manager and tried again. Same message. After 20 minutes, I finally just disconnected it.
My Elements 500G external hard drive has worked fine for years but recently it stopped showing up in "my computer" as a drive. I have windows vista and it recognizes that the elements drive is there (the safely remove hardware icon shows up and it appears in device management). I wouldn't be surprised if the drive was dying as I've had it awhile but since it's still recognized by the computer I was hoping there was some way to access it and salvage the files. Any one have any suggestions? (and I'm not particularly hardware savvy so anything that involves taking apart the drive is probably right out)
I have Windows XP and Vista. I always go through "safely remove hardware" before pulling off USB drive on XP. However, I have been trying to do the same on Vista, it seems that I cannot do the same as XP. For instance, I plug in my USB on Vista and it appears as H drive on Vista, when I am ready to do "safely remove hardware", I don't see the device drive H is on the "Safely remove hardware" window, so I cannot stop the H drive. I am concerned about the Vista hardware.
i was away for a long time so i do not know exactly what happened but the wife had let me know that the cd she had put in for my son was not playing so i aske her to look at "my computer" to see if the dvd icon was there but no. so i told her to go to device manager and uninstall which she did then restsart the computer. On restart the computer said installing driver for new hardware but it failed..have tried other ways of deleting then reinstalling but still i cannot use the cd/dvd drive..have even gone down the route of purchasning a new dvd writer but that did not work. by the way error code is" Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)"
My friend is having an issue long distance and can't see what's going on but is having a problem His DVD drive is not working. What happens is that it is not showing up under "computer" and will not read any disks of course. What does work is when we go to device manager it is listed, but has a yellow warning under it. The drive did work before, but no longer does. Any ideas? He really needs the help and I did everything I could.
I have a few problems at the moment but think most will stem from this. My C: drive is partitioned at 10gb (Disk Managament shows 10gb). Windows Explorer & the driver Properties windows however are only showing 1.00gb capacity & 0mb free.
This may be the cause for me not being able to run downloaded files from the internet & files from an external source (CD Drive). I have tried the usual methods of defreg, disk clean up, resize shadow storge & running Windows Defender (Which is now giving error messages too) & none of these seem to have fixed the problem. There are a few other things I've tried too, but wondered if anyone has come across this before.
CD-rom Drive not showing up or loading CDs? PLEASE READ EVERYTHING BEFORE ANSWERING!!! For some odd reason my cd drive stopped working after doing a system restore, -ive undone the system restores, tried a different one, tried going throug device manager, found the drive and uninstalled it, to be reinstalled by the system, still didnt work The most common solution ive found: ive also tried the regedit solution to delete lower and upper functions but i cant even find a lower or upper key, at one point there was a lower function, i deleted it but nothing happened and now it doesnt even show up, ive tried reinstalling the driver because that was when i first saw the lower, but still nothing
i know my cd rom is not broken or the wiring is not a problem, ive been having a few problems with my laptop lately, so i know its just technical problems, thats why i really want to do a system recovery, to not have to deal with this again for awhile, i finally decided to do do a system recovey to delete all files and start from scratch, but still nothing! There was no installtion cd for my windows vista, so i just did a recovery to reset everything back to the way it was, tried using my recovery discs that i made when i first had the cd, the drive still cant read it, even after i did the recovery
Computer : Im using Windows Vista HP Laptop DV9700 series to be more exact - and im passed the warranty, stupid hp has no technical help for free, called them last week abt why my webcam wouldnt turn on and they wanted to charge me 50 dollars just to help, when i know its not even really broken just a tech glitch, luckily i fixed the problem with the webcam
My system physical ram is 4gb and have also added 4gb kingston flash drive as ready boost. My Os is Vista ultimate X 32 Service Pack 1. In my system details it is shown as still 4 gb and not 8 gb even the cpu meter gadget is showing ram as using 37% which used to be the same without the 4gb flash drive ram - The 4 gb flash drive is formatted using NTFS. However when the properties of the flash drive is checked it is showing 3.66gb used and 62.5mb as free space. Is it possible for Vista to show 8gb ram and not 4gb
I have a 6 month old Toshiba Satellite laptop with VISTA. It has been little used but the Toshiba TEMPRO alert system is now telling me that drive: D has reached 75% of capacity - only 33gb free on a 149gb drive. I have no idea what this 110 gb has been used for nor can I "find" Drive D.
I recently bought a western digital 1TB hard drive which I had to reformat before I could use. Everything works good now, except for onething. Sometimes the computer doesn't want to restart while the new drive is plugged in. If I remove it from the USB port prior to restarting, it will restart just fine.
It shuts down and turns on without an issue. This only happens when I restart the system with it plugged in.
I just Bought a 120Gig External HardDrive and i want to put An O/S on it how do i do that? i bought an external HDD because all my PC games take up all my HDD space in my computer :P)
I got a large external hard drive today and it's instructions say to go to disk management and do format and partition. I messed up and deleted the drives volume. Now it is not listed in disk management. I looked everywhere to get it back and can't figure it out. How do I make Vista recognize this drive again so I can partition and format it?
For some reason, It's unable to either normally format any external memory devices into a FAT or FAT32 format, or unable to read it at all. I keep trying to open the device but it keeps saying that i need to format it, but because of problem 1, it can't be formated (it almost completes but the process shuts down, stating that it can't be formated). This problem has been happening for the longest time and I really need this fixed.
When I say external memory devices, i mean CDs, DVDs, Flash drives, SD cards, memory card readers. Everytime I check the disk management of these devices, it says they are Primary Partitioned (which is the normal status right?). And the only thing that seems to be the problem is the RAW file system (which I heard windows doesn't read). However, the wierd thing is if I plug in something like a USB mouse, or a camera, it has full functionality (I.E. the mouse works/files are reachable on the camera). I then tried to format it using the cmd lines, and tried to format it to FAT32, but after it says 100% formated, and i try to use it again, Disk Management tells me that it's back in RAW format.
i have simpletech 160gb external drive. i cannot access my external drive,i can see the drive but i cannot access it i dont want to format because lots of important file are in it. when i check it from disk management right click the drive E: then on the property windows i choose tools clik the check now boton. it gives me error "The disk check could not be performed because Windows cannot access the disk."
I am in need of assistance concerning my external hard drive. My hard drive has been working flawlessly for the past 3 years. As of today, my computer no longer recognizes it. This is what I have done so far:
-Unplugged it, plugged it back up, and my computer made a chime saying that it was recognized and said that it was ready to go. -However, the HDD does not show up on the my computer tab.
-I removed the HDD from its enclosure, purchased a USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE and tried uploading the HDD to my wife's computer. Once again, her computer chimed saying that it was recognized (she runs XP, i have vista), but, once again, the hard drive was not in the my computer folder.
-I then proceeded to Computer Management, Disk Management, and noticed that my external hard drive is not there either.
I thought that maybe intially my power cord to the outlet in the wall just went bad, but after I bought the USB to SATA/IDE adapter and it still didn't work...well, I ran out of options.
I have a inspiron 530s computer, it has two hard disk drives. The os (c drive and the recovery (ddrive. The os drive is only about 25% full but the recovery drive is 99% full. It keeps telling me my backup failed that i need to free up space, but i don't know what to do or what to delete.
I m using vista business. I have a problem my c drive is 23.44 gb out of which on 12.75 g.b i m able to use. the rest is showing free space in disk management now what do i do?
The C drive is the drive that hold all my programs, the D drive is for extra backup. Yesterday my laptop was showing me an error saying I'm low on memory. I thought that to be odd as I haven't really installed anything. So I uninstalled programs or software that I didn't need or used. Today no matter what I uninstall, and that has been quite a bit, the error keeps popping up saying that I have no memory left. Then it showed me I had 18 MB left and I went back to work. Within a short period of time, I suddenly had no memory left.
