External hard drives disappear

Hi,

My laptop seems to be disabling external hard drives I plug in to it.
When I plug in an external hard drive which previously worked Ok, it does not show up. The power indicator on the drive doesn't even come on.
What's worse, if I then plug the drive into another machine it doesn't work there either.

I've tried this with two external hard drives, both USB-powered, both working on all machines beforehand.

In both cases my laptop seems to affect the hard drive so that, not only can it not be read on my laptop, it can't be accessed on any other machine. The drives were showing up OK on the other machines beforehand.

This suggests that my laptop is somehow corrupting or changing something on the drives.

I have a Sony Vaio VGN-BZ11Xn with Vista, about a year old. I have virus software all up-to-date.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Mark

 

Are you using the same USB cable when connecting the drives. If so I'd suspect the cable is faulty.

 

Hi, no I used different cables

 

Do you hear a buzzing sound, as if the drives start to read, or are they completely dead?
If they seems to be starting up but now showing, can you check the following:

Rightclick My Computer > Manage > Disk management.
Check if you can see the disk there.

IF they're completely dead, I would try taking the disk apart and see if the drive at all works in a PC, if you got one.

If it works its "just" the external shell that is broken. If so, i would recommend you having a look at that USB-port you've been using, as it may be faulty.

 

Please supply the make and model number of your external drives.

I would suspect that both the external drives have failed. Have you any other hardware that you can use to test the USB port.