USB hard drive will not mount (winXP - Asus laptop)

I have an Asus A6Ja laptop running windows XP home. (fully patched and up to date). It is about 6 months old.

Since it was new, I have always had problems with USB storage devices such as thumb drives, USB hard drives & flash card readers. When I insert the device I get sound effects that show that windows has noticed a hot plug event, but the drive never shows up under my computer. When I go to the device manager it says 'device could not start' I have a safely remove hardware icon on my task bar, but it does not show any drives to remove.

My USB hard drive is a Thecus YES nano with a 60Gb drive inside formated FAT-32. It works fine with my windows 2000 desktop and my linux box. I also have some 128Mb-1Gb USB flash drives that don't work either.

Any ideas?

perhaps the usb port on your laptop isnt giving the harddrive enough juice to work properly... perhaps try a differnt port, or get a powered usb hub :) i had this trouble on my old shuttle, and bought a belkin usb hub and that sorted it out :)

I have tried all 4 ports.

The USB hard drive is powered by AA batteries, and will continue to spin when disconnected from the USB port, so presumably has enough power of it's own.

I have also tried an SD card in the internal card reader, and it is detected and read OK.

i reckon its still a usb power issue - especially if it works fine on 2 desktop machines... anyone you know got a powered usb hub you could borrow to try?

i presume the usb ports work with other things like mice etc?

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Originally Posted by da_ging

i presume the usb ports work with other things like mice etc?

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Yes. I have a mouse and a DVB-T tuner that both work fine.

I will look out the power adaptor for my USB hub and give that a try.

good luck :) hopefully that will sort the problem...