Help please! - Weird issue with external hardrives.

Smallhorses

Staff Emeritus
7,260
Hi there,
wondering if someone could shed any light on this issue that I'm having.

I have a Dell Latitude D600 laptop for work. They don't like us using them for downloading shareware or music etc, so I have a separate hardrive for my personal stuff.
Both of the harddrives run Windows XP Pro.

I have 3 external USB devices, a MAX Drive an 80GB desktop drive (USB2.0) and a much slower but portable 20GB Pockey (USB 1.0)

The problem I'm getting is this. If I connect any of the external drives while I'm using my personal hardrive, it recognises the drive letters, but pops up a message saying that the disk is not formatted and would I like to format it now? It does the same thing for all 3 external drives.

Go back to my Work hardrive and it recognises all 3 external devices and will happily explore their contents, open and play media files, pictures, backup data etc.

I have tried restarting the Personal drive, and also disabling and re-enabling the USB ports but it doesn't seem to make a difference. I have checked to make sure the drivers are correctly installed for each device too, and they're present.

Does anyone have any idea why 3 known working external drives with my work HD will not work with my personal drive? How can I remedy this? :confused:

Thanks in advance for any help you have to offer! :cheers:

*Edit* Forgot to mention that this is a very recent thing, all 3 external devices worked just fine with the Personal drive until a few days ago.
 
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