vista not recognising external hdd any more!

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:

Quote:
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?!

Well before you do anything to the drive back up all that data if it's important to you.:)

As far as getting it to work in Vista goes I'm afraid I don't have much experience with external HDDs. You've tried several USB ports I presume...shame that drive doesn't have firewire or eSata to try.

Yes, I've tried other ports and no it does not have a firewire.

Backup is a bit of an issue as the only machine it works on is an old one without a burner. :/

You can't move a burner over from another pc or use the other external drive you mentioned? No space on your internal drives? If I had irreplaceable data I would want at least one backup even if I was having no problems with the drive.

Have you gone through the Seagate Troubleshooting guide?

I can't take credit for this, in PCPlus's 272 helpdesk a reader asked "why Vista can't recognize new usb devices any more?" This sounds similar to your problem so I'll tell how they responed.

This is aknow issue with Vista and is noted in MS's Knowledg base under article No. 940199.

Vista relies on info contained in a file called @infcache.1' to list it with a list of drivers and there locations inC:\windows\system32\drivers. This file can be overwritten, corupted or even deleted by in staller software. When this happen, Vista is sometimes unable to repair or recreate the file and so loses the ability to new drivers for attached devices.

The solution is tofind and download the published hotfix. Incidentally, some websites reccomend deleting infcach.1 as a solution todriver incompatabilty issues (Usually an escape when a poorly written driver has been installed). Never manually delete system files but use the Add/Remove programs feature to remove all traces of the driver.

If this doesn't work, use the system restore feature to return to a point before the driver was installed.

I hope that helps, and any/all spelling imperfections were my own, not the fault of PCPlus

Thanks everyone, however, it seems to have sorted its self out now.

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.

Excellent, glad you got it sorted, good idea on the NAS.

THATS NOT SOLVET YET...SORRY:))

I have got this problem few months now...and thats because of Service Pack1 for Vista and USBports in my case well..its not just me...its 3 laptops with sp1 installed.

Read this:

I have HP Laptop with Vista(no SP1) and PC with Xp onboard..i have also external USB harddrive of WesternDigital 1TB splited on 4 partitions (about 250gb each)...I have never noticed any problems of recognizing my WD1TB on vista aswell as on xp..till friend of mine bought a new Toshiba Satellite M18 laptop with Vista preinstalled...i have took my WD1TB to him to make transfers but...unfortunatelly it recognized just 1st and 3rd partition...and there was NO CHANCE to make it work. I am messing with computers more than 15yrs now..so I have tried all basic things;)...but nothing worked.
SO..I noticed that Toshiba has Vista Service Pack1 installed...so next thing was to check if the WD1TB will be fully visible on another Vista SP1 machine. I plug it in another ToshibaSatelitte laptop with SP1 installed...and still ONLY 2 partitions visible(instead of 4)...so just then I was pretty sure its just because of SP1 for Vista..
To be 100% sure of that I have just installed SP1 on my HP Laptop....BINGO! JUST 2 partitions visible..So what a F*??
There is no sollution for this issue out there! Thats funny..maybe just ppl are using 1partition on their 1TB drives and nobody cares about it? :)

I just left this problem dying..i have even formated hdd on friend Toshiba M18 and installed fresh Vista Ultimate x32 but unfortunatelly it came with SP1 aswell...so...still just 2 partitions..1st and 3rd.

The Disc Management shows 4 partitions...but partition 2nd and 4th is just blank white brick with 230.34GB on it..and thats it. It doesn't show the partition label no healt status and no info of filesystem ....cant do actually nothing with them..(do not want to format etc)...but trying Preperties of these partitions the error apears.."The operation failed to complete because the Disc Management console view is not up-to-date..blahblahbla"

I am gonna get rig of the bl**dy SP1 from my HP Laptop soon..that only solution I think..or better whole vista ..and get the XP instead.

greets

This is just an off-the-wall idea but I thought I would throw it into the mix in case it is a factor people haven't considered on systems exhibiting these problems...

I recently had trouble with USB removable drives not showing up on Vista SP1... I tried all manner of driver updates, reinstalls and fixes, including the MS hotfix mentioned higher up in this thread. I eventually pinned it down to a bug in the version of Acronis True Image 11 that I acquired with my new PC. Upgrading the program fixed the problem.