laptop cant find my internal hard drive via usb!!

leemoo said:

My brother had kind of a similar problem for ages and only after a rebuild of the OS the problem was solved.
Obviously they maybe a fix without a reinstall but he was doing it anyway as had a few issues with multiple things and not specifically doing it just for that but after doing reinstall he found the problem had gone.
You could try going into device manager and removing all usb devices on the laptop and when you restart it will pick up all that should be there and you could also try the drive again.

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little_pob said:

Is this a 3.5" or 2.5" drive? Also how are you powering the drive? The answer to these may provide clues.

Some examples: USB isn't able to provide enough power to allow 3.5" drives to "spin up". If you are powering from a normal PSU, you need to connect it to a motherboard, or at least short pin 14 (historically green, but many manufacturers have go to single coloured wiring) to pin either 3, 5, 7, 13, 15, 16 or 17 (historically black, but this tends to be the colour manufacturers choose if using single colour wiring for the PSU :grayno - a paper clip works best, but make sure you insulate the part that will protrude from the connector block.

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