External HD: USB Device not recognized?!

I'm hoping someone can help me figure this out. Last week I used my external hard drive (HP hd3000s, 300 GB) to store a considerable amount of my photographs from a school computer before they erased everything from this past semester. In trying to transfer my work to my own computer, the hard drive isn't recognized when I plug it into the USB port. I just keep getting an error message stating that the USB device is not recognized and can't seem to get around it.

Now, last week, the hard drive was working fine on my computer, but now it simply won't connect. I've tried with other devices such as my ipod and those all worked fine on the computer. So after that I thought perhaps it was the hard drive, but I tried connecting it to both my laptop and a friends computer and it booted up fine.

The only thing I can think of that's different from last week is a number of automatic updates from Microsoft a few days ago. I'm wondering if that's the problem seeing as this all started right about that time.

Now, I have all my work backed up on discs as well (and on my ipod and laptop also) with the exception of these new files. So while the files are safe, I'd still like to fix whatever problem is keeping me from connecting to my mainly used computer without having to go through extra steps to get there.

Please help!

Sean

 

disable from the bios usb hd. maybe you enable it because if you enable it it will conflict

 

Sorry, just got back from vacation. Tried your suggestions, same problem. Here's the info you guys asked for:

Dell Dimension 4550
WinXP Service Pack 3
1GB RAM
Pentium 4 2.53 GHz

I know the computer's outdated, but its all I really have for practical use until I upgrade to another system. So if you have any more suggestions that'd be awesome.

Thanks everyone I appreciate it.


**Oh yea, while in Device Manager there are no other devices with the yellow ! marks
Sean

 

You're in XP? Okay, try this: Unplug all other USB devices that are not vital to actually running the computer. Plug in the drive and wait for the LEDs on it to come on and the drive to be active.

Right-click on "My Computer" and select "Manage". Then go to "Disk Management" under "Storage" in the tree view on the left. Now, every single drive connected to your computer somehow should show up on the right-side pane, starting with the C:\ drive and going from there. Look for the external drive in this list. It is likely to be labeled wrong, so look for any external drive with the right capacity. If it's there, right-click on it and pick "Change Drive Letter and Paths..." and set it to X.

Get out of there, reboot, and now look in your file explorer for the external drive.

If that doesn't work, post back with all the details you can think of