External hard drive problem

[tiffie23]

Hoping some one could shed some light on this (iomega couldn't).
I have an 120gb iomega external harddrive, I wanted to clean up my old computer by taking it back to factory settings so I disconnected my external harddrive and proceeded with the formatting.

When that was completed I plugged in the external hard drive - usually a little balloon would pop up and a poping sound saying new hardware found blah blah (XP). I'm getting the popping sound but not the balloons saying it's detected. When I go into safely remove hardware it is listed in there.

I can see the drive in disc management but there is no drive letter and it won't let me assign one (the options to do that when right mouse click over drive is not there only "help" is).

The actual external drive itself is humming along when i turn it on and starts up and sounds normal.

I took it and tried on another 2 computers and the same thing was happening. I don't understand how this would have happened as i did everything safely and being plug and play it should just work!!???

I had a few important pictures on the hard drive and all i really care about now is getting them off, to have the hard drive working again would be an added bonus.

Tried with firewire and usb
Model number DHD120-C

I'm pretty much a novice so any help would be fantastic - the drive is now out of warrenty.

Tiff

 

[Nitestick]

did you have sp1 or sp2 on your pc before or was it just the bare operating system?

 

[Rafe]

Is there any installation software?
Do you have the latest drivers for it?

 

[tiffie23]

It was just after I installed sp2 that i had problems with the computer so that's when i decided to re-format to original factory settings. The original computer was bare.

 

[tiffie23]

no software..no drivers...iomega said it's plug and play on xp

 

[tiffie23]

nitestick...your line of thinking is making sense in terms of what was happening at the time....what do you think it could be?

 

[Nitestick]

i'm not sure its just often these sort of problems arise in relation to service packs. i was thinking that perhaps the driver for the hdd was included on one of the service packs you may have had installed and when you re-installed windows it no longer had the driver.

 

[tiffie23]

We just bought a new computer about a month ago and it does the same thing in that one...... :-(

 

[Nitestick]

yeah i realised my suspicions weren't the case when you said it worked without sp1 and sp2. before that i was thinking the other comp may not have had sp1 or sp2. try another pc just to be sure its not just a big coincidence that it doesn't work on your computers.

 

[tiffie23]

i have tried it on 2 of my friends computers as well