Having a bit of an issue with my Dell XPS notebook.

USB pen drives work fine, but it won't even acknowledge my usb hard drive- which worked fine with it until a couple of weeks ago. The hard drive works fine with other pc's and laptops.

I formatted and re-installed vista yesterday hoping it would clear the problem, but now its reporting 'usb device not recognised'

Any ideas gratefully appreciated...

Simon

 

I would be thinking that the issue is the drive, not the computer. Backup the USB drive, reformat/copy back over.

These drives are sketchy at best (IMHO)

dan

 

already tried that

 

Simon

Have you got any other USB devices plugged in ?

If so, unplug them and try the drive on its own

I have found that 'powered by USB' hard drives can be a touch flaky if they draw too much power

What size disk is it ?

I had the same problem with my caddy, which worked absolutley fine with an 80gb drive in it, swap over to my 160Gb drive and it wouldnt work, the USB power wasnt enough to spin up the drive fully unless I unplugged my USB mouse then it worked fine

 

agree -- was going to say the same, looks like a power problem -- can you hear the drive spin up?

 

He said Vista guys, get used to it fella, its so hit and miss on Vista I reinstalled XP Pro on a new laptop after so many problems.

 

Its always been fine until about a fortnight ago.. and works correctly with everything else I plug it in to, hence I believe it to be the dell and not the hard drive.

Funnily enough I tried plugging it in to my media server last night- via usb- it ignored that too, but its always worked fine before.