External HD not seen in my computer

[largegrapeape]

Hello everyone,

I have a tough one here and am hoping that someone has run across this and can offer up some help.
There were several messages like this, but none of the solutions fixed the problem, and some questions seemed vendor specific.

So here's the deal.

Xp Box running SP3 with all current updates

Computer runs fine, however any external hard drives you connect are not seen in "my computer".
They are seen in Disk management. The mouse and keyboard are both on USB and they work fine as does other non hard drive related items.

In Disk management the drives show up as their correct size (healthy and active) and are able to be explored. None of the data is corrupted and is all viewable through either open or explore.

Here is what I have tried.
Refresh (in my computer)

uninstall the driver for anything connected and restart to have the driver picked back up (all times it correctly identified the item plugged in, but would not show up in my computer)

right click on the drive in disk management and go to hardware where it says name and type and disabling the device

only one of the external hard drives has a power source, so I tried even unplugging that power source

moving the items around to every usb port, all get the normal usb ding and are then seen in disk management

renaming the drive and path letter a few times to different letters

trying the drives on other computers, seen just fine.

used the MATS thing with microsoft, but it saw nothing wrong.


Any help will be appreciated, and I will try whatever you suggest. I'm limited to not being able to reinstall windows as no disks came with the machine. I'm thinking it has to be some kind of driver association error or a box in some obscure menu which isn't checked lol.

Once again thank you very much and have a great day.

PSS I was just reading another thread about something unrelated and wonder if there is something in the registry which may be causing this an association or something like that. No new programs have been recently installed.


Thank you.

 

[largegrapeape]

Hi,

I had already done that, and it has a letter now which does not conflict with any other drive.

Only 1 CD drive on the computer so there is C and D and F

 

[largegrapeape]

Hello,

Thanks for the reply Dadiggle.

The drive is already formatted and looks like this

465GB External (K
465.76 GB NTFS
Healthy (Active)

I can right click on the drive and format, but it would presumably lose all the data I currently have, which is a bad deal.
Right clicking now gets you the "this is an active partition on this disk, all data will be lost, do you want to continue"

Were you talking about the steps you mentioned if the drive wasn't already formatted and not listed as healthy?

 

[largegrapeape]

I still have not found a solution, but did make progress even if all but for a very short time.

While searching other sites I noticed that the same error message was popping up for people with Daemon tools installed. I had that installed and uninstalled it as well as did a regedit and removed anything having to do with Daemon and rebooted, the drives were there (insert skys parting and heavenly music)

Alas, upon restart the next day they weren't seen again and there was no reinstall of Daemon tools.

Any other ideas on this topic, over a month it has been buried, so I'm hoping that someone may have some up with something else to try.

Thanks.

 

[largegrapeape]

Bump, anyone?

Even in the disk management scene after removal of the Daemon it still can't copy long file names.

Gotta be something to try

 

[largegrapeape]

I am still experiencing this problem and would appreciate any answers you might have.