Portable Disk Drive not installing

I have an 80gB portable drive which i've had for several years. it works fine on my laptop (Windows 7 Pro) but won't work on my wifes Desktop (Windows 7 Home Premium). The machine recognises the drive when the USB is plugged in, but fails to install the driver and doesn't show up on the Computer display. If I right click on Computer in the Start menu and "Manage" the computer, the drive letter shows up. Any suggestions please?

What make is the USB drive?

Have you tried rebooting with the drive installed?

Is the drop down list showing in Computer?

I had a similar thing happen to me a few days ago. I wiped a HDD to use as a backup, afterwards it would show under "Devices", but not Computer.

What I did (as recommended on the TechNet forum), was used a partitioning tool to format it & assign a drive letter to it (M or higher was recommended). You may not have to partition, but will probably need to assign a drive letter to it.

This can be accomplished by using MiniTool Partition Wizard Edition, which can be found in the Free Software Database on the forum. Or your choice of such tool.

Best of Luck,
Cat

yes assigning a letter higher than already present can help
thanks mate nice suggestion

Hi, Could you try this resolution steps:

1. Plug in and turn on the external USB hard drive
2. Right mouse click on My Computer
3. Left click on Manage
4. Left click on Device Manager
5. Expand the USB list
6. Find the USB device for your USB Hard Drive
7. Right mouse click - Uninstall
8. Unplug USB hard drive
9. Plug on the external USB hard drive and let it find and install the driver
10. It should work