Moving WD 1111 between PCs

I have a WD 1111 1TB external HDD.  For a few months, I’ve been using it  to transfer data between a Win7Pro/64 laptop and a Vista 32 desktop without trouble, simply unplugging the drive from one PC and plugging it into another.  The last  few days the drive is not showing up in Windows Exploer or under Disk Management on the Vista 32 machine, until I reboot the machine.  it shows up as usual on the Win7 machine.  The Vista 32 machine’s device manager lists the drive as WD My Book 1111 when it is plugged in, but it doesn’t show in Win Explorer, so files can’t be accessed.  Any ideas?  TIA.

Your drive is either not online or missing drive letter on Vista 32. Do the following.

Press WinKey + R key and type diskmamt.msc on RUN dialogue box. Disk Management will open.

Look on the right pan of the window for your drive. If shown “Offline”, right click on the drive header and choose Online from the drop down list. If the drive letter is missing, right click on the drive header and choose “Assign Drive Letter & Paths”. Now choose letter W as your new drive letter. Don’t assign letters D, to P or you may get the same problem again.

If this happen on Win7 PC, you can do the same.

Thanks Mabkey.  The drive shows up as healthy, with drive letter O, only after the PC has been rebooted.  If I unplug the drive (from the USB port), and then plug it back in, it will not show up at all in Disk Management or Windows Explorer until the PC has been rebooted, although it does show as a disk drive in Device Manager (as WD MyBook 1111 USB Device).  To get it to show up in Disk Mangement or Win Explorer, I have to reboot.  This does not happen on the Win7 machine.  There I can plug and unplug the drive, without any trouble.  This is a new problem , starting a few days ago.

Alan

Try this…

Open device manager and uninstall your external drive. Remove the USB drive from port and reboot. After OS loading completed reconnect your drive. This should install your drive’s device driver as fresh device.

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Dang.  I swore that would work.  As you suggested, I uninstalled the drive, rebooted with it unplugged, then plugged it back in, and it reinstalled without trouble.  But still, when I unplug it and plug it back in, it won’t show up until I reboot.  Is it possible that this has something to do with the SmartWare on the drive?  I’ve never used it, don’t know what it does, either.

But kudos delivered for your persistence!  Thanks for bearing with me.  Any other ideas?

Alan