External Hard Drive Recognition Problems

I recently bought a Western Digital Elements 500gb external hard drive and hooked it up to my PC using the USB2.0 connection. It hooked up fine (I'm running Windows XP) and was able to put around 20 gig of data on it.

Here's the problem. If I don't do anything with the drive for say 10 minutes my computer stops recognising it (in Explorer it changes the drive name from Elements with the little logo to just a drive that it can't recognise). If I re-boot the machine it comes up fine again (and I can access data on it no problems). As I said - this only happens if there is no activity between my PC and the drive for around 10 minutes. If I keep Windows Explorer open looking at one of the files on the drive I don't get this problem.

This makes me think that the drive automatically goes into some sort of standby power saving mode after a period of inactivity but when I need to re-access the drive it isn't 'waking' up.

The WD website and customer service is absolutley shocking (and there is next to no documentation which came with the drive) so I'm hoping someone here either knows how to fix this or has experienced something similar.

Cheers

 

Thanks for replying.

I have just done that (there were 7 USB Root Hubs and I unchecked that option on each one of them). I have also unplugged the drive from the USB plug I was using (one from a USB card I bought a couple of years ago) and plugged it into one which is from the original motherboard.

If it works I'll probably never know if it was because of those settings or the changed USB connection. Maybe if it does work I'll plug it back into the original USB connection and see if it stops working.