I have an old external hard drive which I plugged into my USB for the first time last night, and it was recognized by my computer, and was full of files my friend put on it for me. Today I plugged it in and the computer can't find it... Well, the disk manager recognizes it (as apparently empty, and no format is listed - it had been formatted NTSF), but when I click on Drive E: from My Computer it's not there, nor does my Defrag window list it as it did yesterday.

This is what happened in between it working and not:

While it was plugged in:

I copied some files from it to my hard drive. I downloaded the k-lite codec pack to my internal hard drive. Then downloaded this USB Safely Remove utility to my internal drive, because I couldn't get permission from my computer to unplug the external drive. This utility indicated that Windows Explorer had locked the drive. I think it stopped Explorer, then said the drive had stopped, so I unplugged it. Explorer does show back up in my Task Manager today.

Today, while the drive was not plugged in, I downloaded Nero 7 from disk. That's all I did, except for browsing my online email. Then I plugged in the drive. I tried it twice. Once I plugged in the USB first, then plugged in the power to the drive. After it wasn't recognized except by this utility, I safely removed it, then plugged it in again, but forgot to first unplug the power, so it was on when I plugged it in. The second time the computer's own safe remove icon flashed little messages that there was new hardware plugged in, but it did not do that the first time.

This is all happening on a Windows XP SP2 laptop. This utility says the USB drive is an IBM-IC35 (followed by a long number).

If anyone has a clue what I should do, please explain it simply step by step, since I'm not very literate in tech lingo, and learning as I go. Thanx.

Hello Isis,

Have you tried to uninstall USB Safely Remove to see if your drive start to be recognized?

Yes, I tried that just now, but the situation remains the same. It appears that the drive got un-formatted somehow after I unplugged it. I tried to re-format it, but I keep getting the error message "the format did not complete successfully".

Hello Isis, I'm sorry for the delay with the response. It seems you have a hardware issue, not a program one. So everything I may recommend in this case is to bring your hard drive to a tech service.

Do you have Acronis installed on your PC ? If yes, see my post http://safelyremove.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=179
//Wolfgang

Ok, so any help regarding this problem would be appreciated beyond belief.

Recently, a.k.a today, Windows has decided to not recognize my USB Mass storage device. It is a Maxtor 120 gb HDD in an NexStar 3 Enclosure.

I have it plugged in directly to a USB port.

My system is an Acer Aspire 3000 Laptop
AMD Mobile Sempron Processor 3100+
Microsoft Windows XP home edition SP2

I have tried everything that I've come across.
This includes, opening the enclosure and making sure the connections are tight.

Booting into Safe Mode, and uninstalling the USB entries in the device manager, so windows is forced to load the right stacks.

And well those are really the only solutions I have come across. Any help would be greatly greatly appreciated. As is usually the case with windows, everything was working fine and then this happens out of no where.

Thanks for your help in mcse braindumps advance

I actually came here while searching for posts with the phrase internal hard drive...but i realize that it was another post that mentioned it. However, are you saying that yours is an internal hard drive that's just in an external enclosure?