[This overlapped with Acadia's post]

Acadia, cedarwolf, are you using a USB-powered external or does it come with a power adapter? USB-powered external sometimes just get too little power to function correctly.(Wouldn't explain why it worked first time, though, and probably they just wouldn't work at all)

Acadia, I'll repeat my question. Did you just reinstall Windows without installing separate chipset drivers? This may not be necessary for your laptop, but my pc's motherboard came with a cd with chipset drivers. Without them my AGP video card and network card would not be identified properly by Windows XP. USB2 should be XP (SP1/SP2) native, but you may have some particular chip.

cedarwolf, your drive is not overheating, is it? Is it hot to the touch?

Don't just reformat your external drive if you don't get it to work. As rty advises extract the hard drive from its case and try it on its own - or have someone try it for you, if you're not sure about doing this yourself.

Message edited on: 09/27/2005 03:30