My backup hard drive recently stopped working. Everytime I plug it in any of my pcs or laptops, it is recognized but it doesnt do the 'autoplay' and doesnt show up under the 'my computer.' I check the 'device manager' and it lists the hard drive but when I am trying to locate the hard drive 'E:' there is no listing under my computer. My hard drive is a Moving Star EMV35SL USB 2.0. On my 2 desktops there are 2.0 USB ports and on my laptops are 1.1 USB ports. But I am getting the same occurrence from the same hard drive. The AC/USB plugs doesnt looked damaged or anything. I tried other peripherals that are either 2.0 or 1.1 USB compatiable i.e. digital camera, MP3 player, printer, and cellphone. And they worked perfectly fine. I notice several days ago; when I was connecting to my laptop an error balloon message from the USB mass media storage icon in the system tray. I cant remember off hand but it mentioned that a file in the 'E:/' drive wasnt either loading or was corruted and/or to make a copy of the file. While this was going on the 'autoplay' took longer than usual and it stalled on one of the files that was loading up. So I pressed cancel on autoplay. And now i have a 250 GB paper weight, lol. I notice that when i power on my hard drive, the green light is on but after I plug it in a pc, and when the balloon window pops, indicating that is recognized the green light then turns to red and stays on red; until i unplugged the USB cord. It goes back to green. I tried using other compatiable USB cords but to no avail. What I am confused about, if my OS recognizes my hard drive, how come I cant access it? I have some important school work on there I needed, if anyone have any idea on what i can do to fix this hard drive problem. let me know, PLEASE!!! HELP!!!! I wish I was a tech geek

The external enclosure may have something wrong with it. Remove the hard drive from the enclosure and connect to your computer inside the case. After you do that check your hard drive. See the latter part of response 1 in this: http://www.computing.net/windows95/...

I had a problem like this in the past. If I remember it was a problem with the partition table? Get hirens boot cd or ultimate boot cd for windows ubcd4win. Try to get the data off, if they can't see the drive. There are lots of tools on these disks, that might help. The first time it happened I bought some data recovery software to copy it, then formatted the external drive. Before posting try google. Backup. Use anti virus software.

You may have disconnected the drive while it was still dumping data from the cache. This can result in corruption. The above responses may be of help. The Knoppix distro of Linux may also allow you to recover data.

I appreciate the info in the replies, I will try all of the suggestions mentioned and I will reply the steps I took to fix, in order to help others out, if they having the same problem for future reference. wish me luck Thanks again