Trouble getting external hard drive to work

I have a Iomega silver desktop 500gb usb/firewire 400/800 external hard drive. Now i was able to back up all my data onto it before I fully restored my pc to factory settings. now it is only accessible from my computer every great once in a while. I have a dell dimension 4600 with windows XP home editions. could someone help me trouble shoot what might be going wrong? I tried contacting the manufacturers for trouble shooting help but that turned up utterly useless. all help is greatly appreciated, thanks

 

bump

 

bad circuit board in external enclosure would be from my experience

i just removed the harddrive avd turned it internal so i knew it wasnt the HD

just my guess

 

alright what? lol external enclosure on the hard drive? can i trouble shoot for that? lol sorry i dont have alot of experience with external HDs since this is my first.

 

You said its only visable from "My Computer", so you dont get that annoying little "what would you like to do" that pops up?

Well, I had my westernal digital my book die on me last week, well the hdd is fine the controller card in the external case acctaully died. Because I dont trust others with my data, I voided the warrenty and opened the case and put the HDD into another external enclosure. It worked fine in the new enclosure. alot of those cheapo externals (sorry) use awful controler cards, why "who knows".

Have you tried another power supply unit of equal voltage ratings, or measuring the voltage with a volt meter. I always thought that its brand new, it couldnt be bad, but the power supply on my new polariod tv, was suspose to put out 12V dc, and it was only dumping out 3.5V.

Honestly, if your so concerned about your data, id either put it in a new enclosure or have some tech savy friend do it... some of those companies dont care and would probably send you and new external drive, without your data on it.

Good luck

 

Well ill try it on another pc first but ill definately contact the manufacturer if its screwed. god i hate technology that doesnt do its job, lazy technology.

 

didnt work on my brother's pc wither. it does make a weird almost beeping sound. is that the hard drive trying to read itself? errrr

 

anyone know of anything i can try?

 

Are you using a long USB cable? They can cause errors sometimes, go for a cable that's shorter than 6ft / 1.8m.