External drive works on one PC - not the other (laptop, desktop)

[DavidSnay]

My father's desktop PC no longer "sees" his external drive, which is connected via USB. It has worked fine for the past three years. I tried it on my laptop and it works just fine. Both PC's are running Windows 7.

Any suggestions? Should I just try reinstalling device drivers? I didn't need to install anything to have it work on my PC.

Thanks,
Dave

[brainwashed_in_church]

Try different USB ports.
Try restarting (power off, and even remove power cord completely no power on the motherboard) the computer and also powering off/on the usb drive.

What does his device manager read? Any yellow flags?

Just to be safe, copy the data from that drive onto your drive so if the drive is going to go, you still have the data.

[DavidSnay]

I don't think the drive is going bad. It works just fine on other computers.
I'll see if I can check the device manager info when I get home tonight. Gotta love remove control!

Thanks,
Dave

[VRE332]

Right click on my computer then go to computer management (or Manage), then go to Storage, then Disk Management. Do you see his drive listed there as Disk1 or Disk2? If it does, it probably needs a drive letter assigned to use it. Don't mess with anything on the first disk or disk0.

[TurcoLoco]

Does he/do you see the following notification upon connecting the device?

[DavidSnay]

It turns out that there is something wrong with the USB port I was using. I plugged his drive into one of the ports on the front of the tower and all is well.....

Dave