USB Hard drive.

Just received a portable usb hard drive and it is supposed to be "hot swap".
On plug in the PC recognises hard drive (safely remove hardware icon exists). In device manager "USB mass storage drive " exists. BUT the drive does not appear in either "My Computer" or Explorer" and is therefore inaccesible. the drive was not supplied with any driver disk and I assumed that this would be unnecessary for a USB device.
Help and/or advice would be appreciated.
All the best for the New Year to Major Geek and his Elves.

 

Since you have "My Computer', you are presumably running XP. Hence, try this, from another site:

this is a know problem in windows XP and it is due to <windows explorer's> handling of giving letters to each volume - it does not recognise networks as volumes, so if you have some kind of network on your system you have to free up some letters after your last permanent HDD or disk drives. Here is a better explanation from http://www.universalsmartdrive.net/s...leshooting.htm

Quote:
3.2.4.2. Drive letter for new device in Windows XP

The information applies to:
· Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
· Microsoft Windows XP Professional
· Microsoft Windows XP 64-Bit Edition

Symptoms - When you have mapped network drives and you try to use a newly installed Removable Storage device, the drive that relates to this device does not appear in Windows Explorer. However, it does appear under Computer Management (Local)>Storage>Disk Management.

NOTE: This also occurs when you add a physical hard drive or CD ROM to the system when a persistent mapped network drive is setup for the user logging onto the system.

Cause - This behavior can occur if you map a network drive to the next available drive letter after the local volumes and cd rom drives have been assigned drive letters. When the new removable device is added, Mount Manager, which assigns drive letters to volumes, does not recognize the mapped network drive and assigns the next available drive letter to the removable device, thus causing a collision with the existing mapped drive.

Resolution - To resolve this behavior, specify a different drive letter for the Removable Device:

1. Click Start on the taskbar, then right-click My Computer on the desktop or from the Start menu, and then click Manage.
2. Under Computer Management, click Disk Management.
3. In the list of drives in the right pane, right-click the Removable Device and then click Change Drive Letter and Paths.
4. Click Change, and in the drop-down box, specify a drive letter for the Removable Device, choosing one that is not assigned to the mapped network drives.
5. Click OK, and then click OK again.

This change automatically updates Windows Explorer, which now shows both the mapped network drives and the recently installed Removable Device. Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

 

Thanks a lot for your comprehensive reply. After getting into disk management I was able to format the disk and get it formatted and a new drive letter allocated.
Another problem solved!

 

Excellent!

 

thankyou saved having to recoverfiles 112gig