Vista no longer sees external hdd
I have a Seagate Free Agent 500gb USB external drive - all was working fine.
Then... I purchased a Seagate Free Agent GO portable drive - this drive has been a bitch and refused to work with vista, it wanted to 'install drivers' - which Vista tried and failed to do.
I gave up with this and used it on my old XP machine instead. (Where it worked fine)
However, today, I go to my beloved 'L: drive' to be told it does not exist! - So, I looked in Computer, and sure enough, just the one external hdd was present, not the usual two.
I looked in disk management - the drive is there - just listed as Disk 6 465gb and grey diagonal lines on it - no name nothing.
I right clicked it, thinking I could simply assign a drive letter - nada - it told me:
I have tried rebooting, as the disk management dialogue told me, still nothing, I even tried a system restore - which did not work - it 'failed to restore due to an unspecified error' - wtf! - I tried with multiple user accounts on the PC too - all to no avail.
I took the drive out and plugged it in to my XP machine and low and behold it worked fine, so I could breath a slight sigh of relief - this drive has 10 years worth of my own vinyl rips and tape rips for starters!
When plugged in to the XP machine it says:
FreeAgent Drive (F:) 465.7 GB NTFS Healthy
So, why can't I see this drive from my main vista machine, and what steps can I take to make it visible again?!
Then... I purchased a Seagate Free Agent GO portable drive - this drive has been a bitch and refused to work with vista, it wanted to 'install drivers' - which Vista tried and failed to do.
I gave up with this and used it on my old XP machine instead. (Where it worked fine)
However, today, I go to my beloved 'L: drive' to be told it does not exist! - So, I looked in Computer, and sure enough, just the one external hdd was present, not the usual two.
I looked in disk management - the drive is there - just listed as Disk 6 465gb and grey diagonal lines on it - no name nothing.
I right clicked it, thinking I could simply assign a drive letter - nada - it told me:
The operation failed to complete because the disk management console view is not up-to-date. Refresh the view by using the refresh task. If the problem persists close and restart the disk management console or restart.
I have tried rebooting, as the disk management dialogue told me, still nothing, I even tried a system restore - which did not work - it 'failed to restore due to an unspecified error' - wtf! - I tried with multiple user accounts on the PC too - all to no avail.
I took the drive out and plugged it in to my XP machine and low and behold it worked fine, so I could breath a slight sigh of relief - this drive has 10 years worth of my own vinyl rips and tape rips for starters!
When plugged in to the XP machine it says:
FreeAgent Drive (F:) 465.7 GB NTFS Healthy
So, why can't I see this drive from my main vista machine, and what steps can I take to make it visible again?!
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I went in to device manager and there was both the seagate usb hdd device in the storage category and then an unknown device in other categories - i removed / uninstantiated both and rebooted, windows then detected new hardware, installed the drivers and prompted for yet another reboot - then it fixed its self.
Quite bizarre as I tried that a couple of times and it didn't work or prompt for a restart, but on the third occasion it did - and low and behold it seems to be working now.
It's got me thinking though - ripping my own vinyl to mp3 and tapes to mp3 was a very long process, some of the restoration work etc took ages - I'd hate to loose that - so rather than burning to dvds every now and then I should probably get a NAS with RAID and store everything on there, then use this seagate as a backup too every now and then - and keep it in a different location.