Dear Brakes,
Thanks alot for your valuable suggestion. I am having the same problem and as per your message I downloaded this tweak and it worked for me.
One think i wish to tell all as per my experience: Soon after installing Tweak software , for me it was not worked but restarting three to four times it worked for me - I didn't even change any settings just installed the tweak software.
I downloaded this software from " http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/tweakui "
Once again thanks to Brakes for giving this information to all.
Thanking you
Suresh

Hi. I have too a problem as windows isnt recognizing my external HDD drive letter. The thing is that i have bought a case for my old laptop HDD so that i can use it as a external USB drive. I plugged it in and the PC recognizes it in the device manager but there is no drive displayed in the My computer window.

I think that it may be a problem cause the drive was my hard drive and named C: , so thats maybe why it doesnt show up in the Computer managment/Disk managment tab. There i only see my current HDD. :S

Any suggestions on how i could maybe change the drive letter even if i dont see it? :/

Thank you so very much for this fix. I have Googled for a week trying to find an answer. I bought a new external Western Digital My Book Essential 500GB. All indications on my computer was that the drive was correctly working. However, the drive was not recognized in Windows Explorer. After reading your fix, I went into Device Manager, disabled 1384 and VOILA! I have a new 500GB WD external drive.

Again thanks so very much for this answer.

Oh.. thanks
disabled my 1394 then I uninstalled My Book
reinstalled and now I have another hard drive
thanks again

tamaho

WORKED FOR ME TOO! CHEERS! TOM

I'm happy to hear someone else fixed this. Can you tell me where, specifically, you did this? I've tried looking in Device Manager, in Network Connections, and I'm not seeing anywhere to disable/enable Firewire 1384.

Thanks in advance.

Where is fireware located like were do i go exactly

Thanks, you saved me big time. I just got the problem today with my toshiba external hdd.

I had vista OS before, I formatted and installed Windows 2003 server. When I tried connected External hard drive (western Digital Mybook) it would'nt recognize it.
After reading all the answers, I went into Administrative tools->Computer Management->Disk Management. I could see all the drives there with the alloted size. There was one drive without any letter alloted to it. I knew it was MYBOOK external drive. So all I did was assign a Letter ( E in this case) and it worked Great! ( I had to give new letter to dvd drive to F, as it had E before). Thanks guys! paritosh.

Yes, I had the same issue and thought it was related to Vista 64. Going into Admin Tools and affixing a drive letter to each external drive (thumb drives too) I had attached fixed thhe problem!

Thanks!

Look into the Network Connections one with the name "Connection 1394". That's the one you have to disable.

You are aware that a Windows Machine cannot mount a Mac-formatted hard disk without software right? Download Mac Drive (www.macdrive.com) or reformat the drive in Disk Management.

You're a genius!!! Nothing else worked. It was just a bad cable the whole time.

I ran into this problem when I re-installed windows XP with sp3. After the fresh installation, it didn't recognize my 500GB Western digital external hard drive. I tried everything but nothing worked until I read another thread on another website saying to connect the power adapter to wall socket instead of power surge protector. It worked perfect for me.

In XP, the link is on the Network and Internet Connections page. As to the hard drive problem, I am no expert but found this thread via Google having experienced similar problems with both a Western My Book and a Seagate external hard drive. None of the suggested fixes worked for me, and I was not convinced that the culprit was SP3 as my laptop (which also runs XP SP3) has no problems with the hard drives. After turning off the PC, disconnecting all USB devices, then rebooting and connecting each USB device in turn, the problem turned out to be my newly-acquired HP OfficeJet All-in-One. If that is on and connected when I turn on the external hard dive, the latter is not recognised by Explorer and just keeps whirring away (and, the case of the My Book, flashing). Turn off the printer and wait for its USB connection to terminate and the hard drive works perfectly without more ado. I can turn the printer back on again (or just reconnect it) without causing any problems with either hard drive but cannot turn the hard drive off and then back on again without having to go through the same procedure. I do not think there is a drive letter clash as I have given each drive (including the multi-card drive built into the printer) its own drive letter via Disk Manager and XP remembers them. Perhaps someone more expert than me can interpret this experience into a generally applicable "fix"

Well my problem started last night after coming back from my holiday I found that on boot up sp3 was installed on my pc and like sp2 the fun started straight away. firstly it would'nt boot without the seagate external drive being switch off. then it worked fine for a few hours then after another restart it failed toshow the contents of the seagate drive, though it told me it was 75% full and how much data was on the drive, no folders were visible. So late last night I left the computing running a scandisk session on the seagate drive. I come to the computer this morning and it was stuck at 37% and on reboot the drive had gone from my pc and the seagate itself was making some strange clicking noises and a clank noise every couple of seconds for about 30 seconds. My pc refuses to detect the drive and I'm not sure what the noises are..have I killed it ?

Omega, your Mac probably formatted the whole WD drive as a Mac partition. Just as when you formatted your Mac to split the C:\ for dual booting and made the Windows partion for XP or Vista that you dual boot to, so must you split the WD so that it can function as both a MAC external drive and a Windows NTFS drive.

This worked for me. When I plugged my brand new WD 400GB drive into the front panel USB ports, it kept popping up a Window asking for me to install drivers.
When I plugged it into the rear USB port, it detected the drive correctly and installed it within a few seconds.

I definitely recommend you try this before anything else.

As it happens, I have NO listing for Firewire 1394 in my Network Connections.

Thank you for posting this tip!

I have the same boot problem with the 1TB MyBook Home edition.

Connected via Firewire it just sits at the WindowsXP screen with the blue bar scrolling across - forever.

My PC Also won't boot when they're connected via USB. I checked PC cmos setup that I don't allow USB bootable drives, so I'm sure that's not it.

I also tried the eSATA connector on the drives and the PC boots up at least; however the drives disconnect after a while with no use, like they're spinning down or something, then I get an error in the event log that says drive did not respond in a timely manner, and the drives are gone until I reboot.

I'm beginning to think that these drives are just crap.

Yes, I was having the same problem. I bought the WD Studio II just for the firewire drive and didn't want to disconnect it. Unfortunately, I went the quick route and bought the Mac Drive program (www.macdrive.com) and it worked like a charm. Opened right up. If you don't mind spending the little cash it is for the program, it worked well for me.

Hi There!

I had a similar issue connecting my TrekStor 500gb external drive to my desktop PC (Dell Optiplex GX240). Fortunately, I had also bought a very inexpensive SD Card Reader (Fuji Film : DCR2-161). I noticed that if the card reader and the drive were connected to the computer at the same time, Windows XP (SP3) would recognize the drive and it worked fine. I have also had success connecting the drive to the card reader, since the card reader also functions as a USB hub. I don't know why this works, but it does!

However, it is important to turn on the computer first and turn on power to the drive after windows has booted.

Hope this helps