External hard drive... please help.

i connected an extarnal hard drive (usb) with my pc. i have windows xp home edition. no drive is showing up in 'my computer'. if i go in the usb device manager properties, it says no drivers are installed for this device. and if i try to populate the device volume it says "volume information for this disk cannot be found. this may happen if the disk is a 1394 of a USB on a windows 2000 machine".

i have valuable data in the disk and i need it today. i do not have windows 2000. is there any way i can get into the drive usic windows XP ?? please help

Do you know the brand/model of the enclosure? It may need special drivers.

brand Que! M3..... it is an 80GB (5400 rpm)

Nope, no special drivers.

Have you tried another USB port?

Have you any other USB drives such as another external drive, thumb drive, or digital camera? They should all also use the generic mass storage drivers as well. If another drive works, it is probably a hardware problem. If no other types of USB drives work either, it is probably a USB/OS problem.

thank you for you replies.
i do have other external drives which works. and i did try different usb port. nothing works.

Well, I am out of ideas personally. If you really need the data ASAP, I say take the enclosure apart and plug the hard drive into the computer directly on a spare IDE connector.

Try putting the drive in the computer, partitioning it, then put it back in the enclosure . That is how I fixed mine.

it seems like if i try to take the hard drive out of it's case, i will have to break the case.

It probably has plastic latches that can easily be snapped back together, either that or you have to slide the drive out one end. The web site says it uses USB 2.0, are you sure your machine has that? Some computers will have both types of USB ports. Also, you can try looking for USB driver updates and see if that helps.

Has this drive ever worked on this machine before?

never worked on this computer before.... it worked with windows millenium and 2000.

You guys ever think that maby its just broken? lol

i hope it is not broken. now all kinds of bad thoughts coming in my mind

Did you ever resolve your problem? I'm having the exact same problem, but NO external drives work on mine...not the CD-RW where I plug in the card, nor the USB mass storage disk that I've tried in all USB ports.

Ann