External Hard Drive Recognition in Vista

Discussion in 'Windows OS's' started by genericcomment, Mar 12, 2009.

  1. genericcomment

    genericcomment Geek Trainee

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    Hello everyone, I have a Dell Vostro 1510 running Vista Business. My laptop recognizes the external HD if I turn it on while the computer is on, but if my laptop goes to sleep while the HD is on then when I restore my laptop it no longer recognizes the HD and tells me there's an error with the HD. Is this a fixable problem? I am getting tired of turning my external HD off and on again every time my laptop returns from sleep mode.
     
  2. donkey42

    donkey42 plank

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    most likely to be a driver problem, have you downloaded the latest drivers ?

    you are best uninstalling your existing drivers then reboot & atatch the external HDD, let Win detect it then install new downloaded drivers
     
  3. genericcomment

    genericcomment Geek Trainee

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    So it doesn't have a driver... It doesn't need a driver according to windows.
     
  4. donkey42

    donkey42 plank

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    ok, right, what kind of external HDD is it then ?

    Edit: possibly a NAS (Network Attached Storage)
     
  5. genericcomment

    genericcomment Geek Trainee

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    It's a 200gb Rock Mobile Disk, I don't know if that helps. By the way, I have another computer running XP home and it has no problem with this drive.
     
  6. donkey42

    donkey42 plank

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    right it's a USB external drive

    right it could be:

    an intermitent fault with either the USB port or cable, try connecting to a different USB port & try it with a known working USB cable & on another system

    finally as the problem related (i assume the device getting power though the USB port, the power output of the USB port obviously drops when the lappy enters sleep mode, if this is the case disabling some options in power managment should fix this or if you can try powering the device with an external PSU

    external HDD sometimes come with a kind of USB adapter which actually connects to 2 USB posts with a single output, so the device can receive power from 2 USB ports
     

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