External hard Drive Code 10

[monomoco]

My laptop's internal hard drive crashed the other day and I had it replaced, and now I can't use my external USB hard drives. Device manager shows an exclamation point and reads 'Code 10: this device cannot start." The drives work on other computers, and my flash drive works in the ports, so it is something specific to this laptop and these drives. They are both plug and play drives, and I have tried updating all my drivers and uninstalling and reinstalling and disabling and enabling... nothing is making a difference.
The drive that was put into my laptop has much less space than the previous one ( I think it's a 120 G). Could that keep me from being able to use my external drives?

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

No, a smaller hard drive wouldn't cause that problem.

Some troubleshooting tips here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/943104

 

[monomoco]

Thanks for the reply, but i have already gone through everything on that page. I also installed Service Pack I yesterday, but still the same thing happens.
I forgot to mention earlier that the external drive does power up and spin, so it seems to be getting enough power. I am stumped.