Portable HDD not recognised by anything

[oldskooladdict]

I have a Seagate FreeAgent GO drive which has caused me problems from the word go (had it about year). The intention was to use the drive with my linux based netbook whilst out and about, so essentially transfer tunes from Windows PC to this hdd, then enjoy on netbook etc.

When I got it last year my main Vista PC refeused to see the drive, then when it did it messed up my other Seagate usb hdds! - I plugged the drive into an old XP machine and copied files across. This eventually worked on the netbook too.

So, last weekend I formatted the drive using the XP machine - it's a 120gb drive so I created 4 partitions on it - 32gb each and the remainder for the 4th one. The netbook saw this and everyone was happy, I'd begun transferring files across to it.

Now, a week later, I plug into the XP machine, nothing, the Vista machine, nothing, the Vista laptop (which it was working in last week), nothing, the netbook, nothing!

The drive's on as it has a massive orange light at the bottom which comes on when it's alive. It's not making any nasty noises or anything suggesting hardware failure (not been dropped etc.).

So, no PC can see the drive, in any shape or form!

What can I do next? - I'm 100% not bothered about anything on there, it's just been copied from other drives. Literally no PC will recognise the blasted thing!

I've tried going in to disc management and nothings recognised there either - not like it cannot do anything as it doesn't have a drive letter or it doesn't recognise something on it, it's just like it doesn't exist!

[peterb]

Is it formatted NTFS?

[oldskooladdict]

Thanks for the reply peter. It was formatted to FAT32 using some app I found last year.

I've got it to work again now - bizarrely enough it seems if I plug in both the power and data and power usb connectors FIRST then plug the mini-usb connector into the hdd it seems to work.

Most odd as I didn't need to do this before - I seldom tool the mini-usb connection out of the hdd.

Makes me think the drive is more than a tad temperamental - just glad it's not part of my important data storage or backup plan!