Thread: Vista doesn't recognize my external USB drive

But it's a little more complicated than that. I'm hooking up an IDE drive. I'm using one of those external USB kits - it's an usb to IDE cable and a power supply for the drive. It works great in XP, shows right up in 'my computer' and I got some files off it. It's formatted NTFS and worked in this same PC as an internal drive. Vista (my vista 32 laptop and my 64 bit machine) loads up some drivers and tells me it's ready to use a 'usb mass storage device' but it does not show up in 'my computer'. It shows up in device manager under disk drives, usb drive and is 'working correctly and it shows up in 'computer management' where it tells me the drive has not been 'initialized' but it can't initialize it.

It's kind of an off brand, creative i/o, couldn't find any support on-line. The direction say it works in Vista, no drivers needed in XP or Vista, and trying to update driver in device manage it tells me I have best driver already.

Thanks

Perhaps the device is corrupting to the extent it is not recognized 'properly'. Properly meaning not showing up in My Computer. Vista is recognizing it, or incorrectly recognizing it (confliction) as something other than what it should be displayed as. Driver conflict sort of thing. I had that happen with a wireless notebook adapter. Machine recognized it with some other system driver on startup. As soon as desktop loaded, all I had to do was unplug it then plug it back in and windows would find recognize it correctly and install the proper driver then and only then. It worked as advertised. Have you tried going in to Safe Mode and then plugging it in?

I think I may be on to something. XP had previously had it working but when I just now put it back on the XP machine XP says it is 'uninitialized' - just like Vista said too, so, something happened to it, I guess, maybe in this external hookup attempt the data was corrupted - anyway XP at least offered to partition and format it so I'll see if that works. I didn't care about the data on it thankfully.

I have a similar device at work... at it works fine with Vista. Comes in really handy when you have a customer machine with a hosed Windows install and you need to back up their data before reloading it.

I just got a Maxtor one touch4 and am getting much the same results. In disk management it recognizes the disk as disk 1 (0 being the main drive)
and not initialized.

It does got on to say that it is write protected. I'm not certain in your case if this is the prob and mine is a USB only setup but strangely XP missed it and Vista found it and installed drivers.

Perhaps we could help each other. The one thing that I have found is that Maxtor will sell me the driver to perhaps reset the drive, Im not sure yet and maybe yours would do the same.

Possibly you are running into the same problem or maybe you can send me in the right direction.