# External hard rive not appearing in "my computer"



## BREWBERRY (Sep 25, 2008)

*External hard drive not appearing in "my computer"*

you may have heard of this problem before but i have an interesting poblem i resently purchased a 200g generic external hard drive, and it works fine on every comptuer except my home PC wich is a Dell Dimension 4700c Xp os.

When i plug it into my home pc the dell 4700c the systems recognizes the removable mass storage device, it appears in the device manager under disk drives and i get the icon in the system tray to safely remove usb mass storage device, but it does not appear in "my computer" or in disk management or in removable storage under the computer management section. to make matters worse my ipod shows up in all those location as a usb mass storage device and the computer name it drive e:

now if this thing didnt work fine on every other computer i have tried it on i would say its just a bad piece of hard ware but it works perfect everywhere eles.
o yeah i unistalled/reinstalled and updated the drivers though the hard drive claims it does not need any.


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## stressfreesoul (Mar 17, 2008)

Is your XP install fully updated with all service packs and patches?
Also, are your USB drivers functioning correctly? Try downloading them from the Dell website and then manually removing the old and installing the new drivers (with add/remove programs and the downloaded drivers installer).


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## BREWBERRY (Sep 25, 2008)

ya my XP is fully updated but i will try to download the new drivers from dell and do a manual install i hope that works seems like a long shot though . o ya the usb are all working correctly acording to the device manager


>>>>> well i went to dells web site i checked all the drivers for the dimension 4700c i found nothing specfic to USB so im at a dead end again


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## hlloggins (Oct 12, 2008)

i HAVE A MEMOREX ULTRA TRAVEL DRIVE, IT DOES THE SAME, YOU CAN VIEW IT IN DEVICE MANAGR BUT NOT ACCESS ITG THROUGH MY COMPUTER, ANY SUGGESTIONS?


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## BREWBERRY (Sep 25, 2008)

hlloggins said:


> i HAVE A MEMOREX ULTRA TRAVEL DRIVE, IT DOES THE SAME, YOU CAN VIEW IT IN DEVICE MANAGR BUT NOT ACCESS ITG THROUGH MY COMPUTER, ANY SUGGESTIONS?




This works for me half the time 

go to your device manager and go to the USB controllers section 

right click every item in that list and select update driver on all of them.

FYI i did this while my drive was not plugged in.

another thing that seems to work was to go to device manager and uninstall the portable drive from there while it is plugged in, then unplug it and plug it back in

It seems i have to do this often to make my P.O.S. drive work i hope yours was better


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## elsy0224 (Oct 31, 2008)

Hi I bought a Samsung L700 camera, and forgot to install the S/W CD-ROM, my laptop detected the USB device, so I was able to download my pics, but now is not recognizing it, and if I install the SD card it won't take it anymore as well. the problem is that I can't find the software. Any suggestions??? Thanks


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## stressfreesoul (Mar 17, 2008)

This is a link to the driver for your camera.


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