USB External Hard Drives not registering in Vista Home Premium

I have a pair of external hard drives that are used as storage for my home
network, both of which worked just fine in XP, but have only worked once
since installing Vista on my computer. I don't know how they actually ended
up working, but I since restarted and went into XP to finish up some things.
Since then, I've gone back to Vista, with no luck of either drive showing up
and being usable. I'm thinking of just going back into XP for a while until
theres some sort of fix for this, because I need those drives working. Anyone
have any ideas?

PS: I can't find any trace of the external cases even being found, no
"unknown device" messages or nothing. Just quiet, no idea if they are being
found or not.

 

Are they using USB or a Firewire connection? I have a couple USB
external drives that work fine with Vista. What you may want to do is
switch the drive(s) to a different USB/Firewire port and see if
Windows picks them up.

 

| I have a pair of external hard drives that are used as storage for my home
| network, both of which worked just fine in XP, but have only worked once
| since installing Vista on my computer. I don't know how they actually ended
| up working, but I since restarted and went into XP to finish up some things.
| Since then, I've gone back to Vista, with no luck of either drive showing up
| and being usable. I'm thinking of just going back into XP for a while until
| theres some sort of fix for this, because I need those drives working. Anyone
| have any ideas?
|
| PS: I can't find any trace of the external cases even being found, no
| "unknown device" messages or nothing. Just quiet, no idea if they are being
| found or not.

I had the same problem with XP SP2 13 months ago. I switched out the PCI card
for USB for a different manufacturer of chip and it seems to have cleared up for
the external drives, but my mp3 recorder messes up on this card. Same symptoms,
works one time then nada. External hard drives almost became corrupted (trash
can material) beyond usability because of this bug. I forgot which chip on which
USB card was responsible for failure or success, but I still blame Windows
Update.