Weird issue with older external USB HDD

I built a new machine with the specs in my sig.

I have an older 300GB USB HDD, Seagate or WD, not sure

Problem is that on the new machine with Windows 7 64 bit, it will not recognize the drive properly. Tried plugging it in to a USB 2 and USB 3 ports and it just says that there is a problem with the device and it is not recognized. It keeps disappearing and reappearing in the device manager so fast that I cannot right click it and attempt to try to find drivers or anything.

Take the drive to my laptop running Windows 7 32bit or my old computer running windows 7 32bit and it sees it just fine.

The machine is seeing my 2TB and 3TB drives just fine. It's just this older drive. All 3 drives are NTFS formatted

Any ideas?

No ideas? I know I'm lost on this one.

I've seen this before, and the workaround I've employed is to either:

1. Use a USB hub
2. Use a different enclosure

I'd theorize that it's a current (as in amperage) issue.

I'll give it a shot but I doubt that it's a current issue as the other two machines that it works on are laptops and the one that it does not is a tower with a 700W power supply plus the HDD has its' own power supply. Another enclosure is not an option as it one that was bought already in an enclosure (it's a MyBook).

I think at this point I may end up just transferring the data over to one of the larger drive and using this with the laptop.

FWIW my external drive required a driver and it still does not play well with my new box. It doesn't wake up well from sleep and if attached at boot time causes some pretty bazaar weirdness with the system. It works fine on my laptop. I noticed that you have the Z68 chipset. So do I. What USB controller is used with the Z68 chipsets?

I had the issue 2 weeks ago.

I solved it by doing a low level format of the drive: it was not recognized by the windows device manager, but it was seen in the low level format utility.

manu2b said:

I had the issue 2 weeks ago.

I solved it by doing a low level format of the drive: it was not recognized by the windows device manager, but it was seen in the low level format utility.

Click to expand...

Thanks, that is helpful. I fear I may have to pull the data off of it with the laptop and put it on another drive the do a LLF on the new machine.

Weird isn't it?

FX4 said:

FWIW my external drive required a driver and it still does not play well with my new box. It doesn't wake up well from sleep and if attached at boot time causes some pretty bazaar weirdness with the system. It works fine on my laptop. I noticed that you have the Z68 chipset. So do I. What USB controller is used with the Z68 chipsets?

Click to expand...

I could be wrong here but I think that all Z68s have 2, an Intel and a Marvell

Lord Vader said:

Thanks, that is helpful. I fear I may have to pull the data off of it with the laptop and put it on another drive the do a LLF on the new machine.

Weird isn't it?


I could be wrong here but I think that all Z68s have 2, an Intel and a Marvell

Click to expand...

Intel and Marvel are the Sata controllers.

Just a thought, but is "allow legacy usb" enabled in the BIOS? Worked for me with an older flash drive...

Wasn't allow legacy USB. Darn, I was hoping that would do it.