Losing drives that then reappear?

Hi guys I did try to search to see if this problem was covered as per the suggestion but cant find anything relevent.

I think I am going insane.... My rather nice fairly new (Jan 06) 'puter has behaved very well.... til now:

It has a multiple memory card reader drive on the front which is dead useful. However, one day a couple of weeks ago they disappeared!!! Thats it... no little LED light lighting up.....no mention of them in my computer..... no mention of them in the drivers section!!! They were dead.

I recently bought a new external hard drive and took the opportunity to completely power down the 'puter to rearrange some cabling.... When I plugged back in...... there were my lovely card readers all working and appearing in my computer and everything... Hooray!!!

However, after a few says I noticed they had gone off again... so I powered down again and switched on... there they were!!!

Anyway, it turns out that whenever I connect my USB external hard drive to my computer, the computer forgets all about my built in card reader!!! Even on hibernate it doesnt help..the only way to get them back is to actually disconnect the external drive, power down, actually disconnect from the mains, then power up!!! Now, I can do that and since my external drive is only used a couple of times per week it aint too arduous.... but surely I should be able to use an external hard drive without losing my card readers???

Any thoughts or suggestions much appreciated!!

Cheers now

Rick

 

Many thanks for your reply Tim but I am not presented with a power management option in properties in device manager I am afraid!

I am assuming you mean....

Control panel
System
Hardware
Device manager
Disc drives
Right click the drive
properties

??
One funny thing however.... I note that my card reader drives are designated as "USB"!!!!

As an example, the Sony memory stick drive is called:

"GENERIC USB STORAGE-MSC USB DEVICE"

does this seem rather odd and could it be conflicting with the actual USB external disc drive? It is definitely plugging in my external drive that turns off the card reader drives!!

So many questions!!!!