USB External HD recognized but name changed & now!

I have had this WD external harddrive for almost 2 years now. It has worked fine and always shows up as drive F:Mark's Music. Today I got another External HD and plugged it in first, it came up with drive F:, I then turned on the WD and it came up as H: , I right clicked on my computer and went to manage, and switc ...

Windows Hardware 9627 This topic was started by ,


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Joined 2008-01-23
I have had this WD external harddrive for almost 2 years now. It has worked fine and always shows up as drive F:Mark's Music. Today I got another External HD and plugged it in first, it came up with drive F:, I then turned on the WD and it came up as H: , I right clicked on my computer and went to manage, and switched drive H: to drive S:, then changed my WD back to drive F:. Now it shows up, but only as "local disk", and when I click on it, it says this drive needs to be formatted, do you want to do this now! WTF

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I've seen sometimes Windows will corrupt external hard drives in some situations.
 
I've noticed it happens after a hibernate if you have one external drive plugged in and then when you boot the computer back up and have a different external HD plugged in that it will corrupt the partition. Run CHKDSK fixes the issue (and loses some data) sometimes.
 
 
I would try plugging the drives one by one into a different computer and seeing if they show up properly. Then run a full CHKDSK on each drive. (Don't plug both in at the same time while doing this although really it shouldn't matter). Then reboot the computer that you experienced the issue on try each drive one by one.
 
 
I've experienced the above issue on 2000/XP/2003/Vista too by the way.....

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OP
I tried plugging the hd into other computer with vista, same issue, says the hd needs formated "do you want to do this now?".
Here's the weird thing, I went out and bought a new external, borrowed buddy's hd with my files on it and copied them to the new drive. Buddy comes to work today and says, same thing happened to his harddrive (which is also an external)! I ran virus scan on the new drive, and came up with nothing. I then formated my old external, which I am now in the process of recoping my files onto for backup! I never had any issues with my origional external until I got some files from my buddy's harddrive at work. Now his is screwed! One other thing I looked in disk manager, and seen the Maxtor driver for his hd, I uninstalled it, but when I reboot it picks it up again!