Hard drive not recognised

[Alison556]

My brother has an external hard drive on his computer - never had a problem with it.

However, he was running out of USB ports, so he got a 4-port hub and attached that up. At the same time, his free AVG updated to version 9.

Now his hard drive isn't recognised at all. I took it off and attached it up to his laptop to make sure that it wasn't the drive or cable and it worked fine on the laptop but back on the desktop, it just doesn't seem to exist.

He's taken the hub off to see if that was the problem and I disabled AVG to see if it was that that was the problem but it still doesn't work.

Did a bit of a hunt online and downloaded TWEAKUI - the drive is showing up and is checked, but it's got a question mark against it.

Anybody any ideas?

 

[gblades]

Does the drive have its own power supply or does it take power from the USB port?
Does the USB hub have its own power supply?

If the drive takes power from the USB and the hub doesnt have its own power supply then I suspect there is not enough power from the USB to supply all the devices connected to it via the hub.
Each device tells the computer how much power it requires and the hard disk may well say 500ma which is the maximum. Even going via an unpowered hum with nothing else connected will take it over causing it not to work.

I would connect the drive to the notebook directly. The drive uses the most bandwidth and power so this makes sense. Then connect things like mice, keyboards and printers via the hub.

 

[Alison556]

The external drive has it's own power supply but the hub didn't - it just plugged into a USB port.

He's also got this all singing all dancing keyboard - it lights up and has loadsa buttons and things for gaming I think and it's showing as having an error even though it's working.

Can you add extra USB ports directly to the desktop or do you need to use a hub? He's wanting to upgrade it - got a price for a new motherboard, processor and memory but wondered if he'd be as well adding extra USB's if possible.

 

[ChrisJ78]

You can get PCI cards with USB ports in, and shouldn't cost very much.

What happens with the drive if you put the original keyboard back in? Daft one, but did you also plug the drive back into the same USB it used to be in? Tried other USB ports?

 

[Alison556]

To be honest, I don't know what he's done with the original keyboard. He says he's "put it away" - that could mean anything!!!!!

I'll try and find it tomorrow and try it.

The drive wasn't plugged into the hub - I THINK it was the keyboard he plugged into the hub.

I'll uninstall the drivers for the keyboard tomorrow and try the old one and see if that makes a difference.

 

[Trisha88]

I have had this problem before & I was told to disable and re-enable the USB Host Controller

see:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/817900

b.t.w: a word of advice....never just pull about a USB device (such as external drive/memory stick) always use safely remove hardware tool (bottom R.H corner icons)