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?!