External HD detection issues

[MisledYouthUK]

I've just had this problem come up over night. Yesterday I was using a couple of external hard drives with my SP2. One was a 1TB portable and the other a 3TB powered. I turned my SP2 off last night and it didn't do any updating or anything. I've come to use it today and it's not detecting either of the hard drives. However when I put a smaller 16GB pen drive in the USB it detects it straight away. The power light on the 3TB comes on when it's connected and there's a brief whirring sound but no recognition by the SP2. Both HD's work fine on other computers. Has anyone else had a similar issue or am I doing something glaringly wrong here?
Thanks

 

[mennogreg]

Are/were the hard drives connected via a hub, or directly to the Surface Pro? Also, does it show anything in Device Manager when you have one of those hard drives connected? If it's the latter, perhaps this will help.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc725782.aspx

 

[MisledYouthUK]

Thanks for the reply. They're not connected via a hub. Straight into the SP2's USB port. Nothing shows up in device manager when they are connected but when I connect the 16GB pen drive it immediately appears. Very strange.

 

[Korlon]

I'm just thinking this sounds like a similar problem I had years ago with an external drive. I also had an external that wouldn't be recognized by a computer, got a short whir on plug in, lights blinked then either stopped or went solid. My issue was the previous power down I didn't safely remove the drive and a CRC error formed. Normally a CRC error doesn't stop recognition, but from what I was told, and I'm NOT an expert on it, if a CRC error develops on the first few sectors of the drive it can prevent a computer from recognizing the drive.

Again, I'm no expert on the technical stuff, but as I said your situation does sound similar to mine.

Only way I know to fix this issue is to run a chkdsk on the drive from the command line with the repair (/r) attribute. Unfortunately if your computer won't read the drive then I don't see how you can do this. Perhaps bringing the drives to tech support where you bought them, or exchange them for new drives?

 

[Nuspieds]

What has happened to me over the years with Windows is that I'd plug in my portable USB drive that I've using forever and all-of-a-sudden, I would not see its drive letter appear.

Eventually, I discovered that it did appear in Disk Management, so there was nothing wrong with the drive whatsoever. Once I re-assigned a drive letter to it, things returned to normal.

 

[kozak79]

Are the hard drive powered through USB or have their power supply? If they are USB powered, you may just be in power saving mode where it limits how much juice the USB port is giving out. I've also noticed, especially on laptops, that the length of your USB cable matters quite a bit. On Hard Drives you want as short as possible cables. I have found that longer cables would not power an external hard drive, but shorter cables would.