PCTech Forums

Hi i am a newbie here, i just bought an external hardisk last week. I am having the following problems. My external hardisk is a 3.5'' with internal fan but unknown brand. When i plug my hardisk to my USB 2.0 port of my PC, it's being detected as i can see the USB Mass storage icon appearing at the bottom right toolbar. But the drive doesn't appear when i click on My Computer.Sometimes, my external hardisk is not even detected, and i get the follwoing message. " One of the USB devices attached to the computer has malfuntioned and windows does not recognise it. I doubt anything is wrong with my hardisk as it works perfectly well on my laptop. My PC is using XP operating system and my external hardisk doesn't require any driver.

Possibly you have about 4 usb devices you use all of the time and you just plug them in. If you have 4 usb slots, you can install one item 4 times. --you can see where I am going with this.

What you need to do is go into Device Manager and remove all of the usb devices and also look up in the hard drives section for pen drives and usb drives. and remove them.

Reboot.

On boot it should find everything if it was installed aok, if not you might need the install disk.

If it has already been installed sucessfully before, you only need to point to the c:\windows\inf file to have a sucessful install. There are 3 sub directorys in that hidden file that you might also have to point to, depending on where it was put.

This should allow you to see it--if it is formated.