My Dell Inspiron with Vista Home Basic laptop doesn't recognize my portable western digital 500 gb external hard disk.
1, the lights in my external hdd blink and the disk seems to be working when I touch it,
2, the hdd shows in my device manager and it says the drivers are up-to-date and is working properly
3, the hdd doesn't show up in disk management
4, every time I connect, there is a message saying the usb device is not recognized.
5, the hdd works when I connect it to another comp (my desktop with windows 7)
Please help

You can try going to control panel. Then device manager. Then right click on disk drives after it is plugged in and click refresh. See if it comes up after doing that.

Hey Califdadof3,

Thanks for responding. Like I said, the HDD shows up in Device Manager and says drivers are fine and that the device is working properly. But the HDD does not show up in Disk Management. I am sure that this has something to do with Vista because my HDD with the same USB cable works perfectly fine in my Desktop Win7.

What is confusing is that the same HDD worked perfectly on my Vista Laptop till 2 days ago.

Thanks!

Sometimes it wants to be added to your PC as a Drive Letter that is already taken. If you CD/DVD rom is already on E: F: or something like that...
1. Change the drive letter of your CD ROM (inside Management - Disk Management - right click on drive- choose Change Drive letter)
2. Unplug and re-plug in the external hard drive.

Have you tried using a different USB port? As in, a different port on the laptop?

Here is where you should go to get Microsoft to check over the entire computer.
This will let you know if there is anything wrong.



http://support.microsoft.com/fixit/

Download fix it program. And follow the instructions.