Be Excellent To Each Other

Since my computer went a bit funny yesterday, I bought a Toshiba External Hard drive to back up all my stuff.

I plug it in via USB, and it is identified by Windows as "USB Device".

It then goes looking for a driver for it, and fails to find one. It looks on the net for one and fails to find one there either.

Ummm... what the hell do I do? The tiny manual says "Plug in, it'll work", but it doesn't.

Any ideas?

Are you running some ancient version of Windows?

XP?

No. Harumph. Plug it in, Start | right-click Computer, Manage, Disk Management, and see if it is shown under there. It's just barely possible it isn't formatted, or is Mac-formatted, or something equally outlandish.

Edit -- if you're not sure what you are looking at, screencap it and upload the screenshot here.

Hmmmm... still not working, and not there where you say to look.

It works fine on the fiancee's PC, but not mine. So there's something wrong with my PC... dammit, I knew that already! It's whay I need the bloody drive!

Bah.

I'm attaching it to a USB hub, so I'm going to try to connect it directly and see if that works (annoyingly I only have two working USB ports on my PC and both are behind it which is hard to get to, and my annoying Bluetooth keyboard takes up one of those slots, so by plugging in the hard drive to it I will have to unplug my wireless internet thingy. It's be fine if the frontal USB ports worked, but they don't as whatever was holding them in place broke, meaning the bit inside the PC is too far back to plug in to, which is also the reason why my PC has no sound other than that of a dying fan).

*sigh*

You'd do better to remove the hard disk from your PC, put in an external caddy, and plug that into t'other half's PC. But the caddy you just bought might not work, depends if the drive inside it is compatable with your old one or not.

What SP of XP are you running? You may need SP2.

Also, external hard drives are a pain in the butt. Ones that have their own power supply are good, but ones that take their power from USB are annoying.

It worked fine once I removed the USB Hub and plugged it straight into the lovely USB slot directly on the PC. This just means that I can only run two of the External HD, Keyboard and Internet at one time.

However, now I have most stuff backed up that should cease to be a problem, and hopefully my clunk and cumbersome PC will stay alive for another six months, as I didn't budget buying a new one into our wedding plans!

Was you hub powered?

This. HDs need a lot of current, usually everything a single port can supply. Get a powered hub or put an extra USB card in the PC.

It steals power via two USB inputs.

Meh, I wouldn't trust that.

Nope, it's best to have either a powered hub or an external HDD with its own mains power.