External HDD Shows as Removable Drive in WinXP

[jpalmer]

I have two external hard drives (internal HDD's in external enclosures) connected through USB ports; the drives have been working properly (I use them for backups). Out of the blue one of them now shows in WinXP as a Removable Drive and it's no longer accessible. I've tried deleting the Removable Drive through Device Manager but it keeps coming back as a Removable Drive every time it's turned on (or if it's on during boot). The second external HDD is working fine and the problem isn't with the USB port into which the first one is plugged. Partition Magic doesn't see the drive at all (it sees Drives 0 and 1, which are internal, and Drive 3, which is the working external drive; I guess it somehow knows there should be another drive because the "Drive 2" designation is missing).

Any ideas?

Thank you for your time!

Jay

[Kermit911]

Try pluging the external hard drive into a different usb port.

[Jago]

Are you sure you do not have the read-write feature disabled on your harddrive. If you could tell me the models of the hard drive, I'll dig up a lil' information for you.

[YvetteKuhns]

Out of the blue one of them now shows in WinXP as a Removable Drive and it's no longer accessible.

Have you recently installed other software or Windows updates? Since you said both external hard drives worked before, it doesn't sound like a USB connection problem or IRC problem. Have you tried swapping where the hard drives are connected?

Did you have something else plugged into the USB port temporarily such as a digital camera? I know that if I try to connect one of my scanners where my digital camera was, the computer thinks that I am trying to connect my camera. The BIOS shows the camera assigned to that IRC setting.

Do you have any memory cards, cds or any removable media somewhere readable by the computer at bootup? Windows XP looks for cds as startup and you may just have a cd in your cd drive when you are booting up your computer.