Desktop Stopped Seeing External Drive

I'd been happily using a 4-year-old Maxtor external hard drive until midday a few days ago. Then, " next time I looked", it had disappeared from My Computers and from Explorer. I checked all the cables, power, etc.; all seemed well, but no luck in getting back the drive. As far as I know, it had used the generic Microsoft driver; in any case, I couldn't find any Maxtor disk in my CD driver collection, nor could I find a driver to download at the Maxtor (now Seagate) site. Finally took it to a local technician. He said he hoped he could save the data, and called me the next day to say that he had been able to transfer it to his server, and could transfer it to any new external drive I brought in. I asked him what seemed to have caused the problem, and he replied "circular redundancies". This leaves me totally puzzled since I'd always thought that this was a software problem, and a little research seemed to confirm that idea. I'd be grateful for any clues as to how a software problem could cause a hardware problem, and 4 years out, at that. TIA, Justine

Hi jr4939…

If you have your external drive there with you, try this. Disconnect it from the machine. Open Device Manager, and expand the category "Universal Serial Bus controllers". In the expanded list, you should see one or more USB Hubs. Right click on each hub and choose "Uninstall"…accept the change. Close Device Manager.

Click Start, then Run, type prefetch and click "Ok". The Prefetch folder will open. Click "Edit" on the toolbar and choose "Select All"…press the Delete key. This will clear the Prefetch of current files…it will repopulate with relevant files when you reboot. (Note: It may take up to four reboots to completely repopulate this folder. Until it is fully populated, boot times may be slightly longer.)

Reboot. When your machine starts, it will reinstall the USB Hubs automatically with fresh driver files…and will place copies of the files in the Prefetch folder.

Connect the external drive to your computer and see if it will detect and install.

wannabe1