My 500G External Hard Drive won't load anymore. The problem started with intermittent connectivity and now when powered up, all it does it ding and click every couple seconds. Ding...click.......ding...click, like there is something not connecting to the hard drive to make it spin.

You need to replace the USB socket.

Try connecting the external hard drive to another computer to recover/backup your data.
When you have such a large capacity hard drive, it pays to have a second large capacity hard drive to backup your data in the event of the other hard drive dying.Hard drives do fail especially if you accidently drop it.

ry connecting the external hard drive to another computer to recover/backup your data.
When you have such a large capacity hard drive, it pays to have a second large capacity hard drive to backup your data in the event of the other hard drive dying.Hard drives do fail especially if you accidently drop it.

I spoke with Numark regarding intermittent cutting out of 750g Seagate hard drive. They claim the problem is with the size of hard drive and recommend using nothing larger than 500g. Bit of a shame really. Surprised no firmware upgrade to incorporate newer storage solutions.

It is very possible the voltage on your computer's USB port is not handling the load. I would buy a "powered" USB 2.0 hub, plug it into your computer's usb port and plug the harddrive into the powered hub.

Buy a new "empty" external disk-drive case for $30.

Pick one that has "data" and "power" connectors that are compatible with your current disk-drive.

Put the disk-drive into the new case. Done.

Try the hard drive on another computer to see if it is the external or a laptop interface problem. There are EIDE/SATA to usb adapters that you can connect a hard drive to that the computer will then read as an external hard drive. The problem with external HDDs is the usb interface built into them, these are mounted on controller cards and that is ususally where the failure occurs.

Hello,

First of all make sure that the USB port that you are using to connect it to your PC is a USB 2.0 port, and not USB 1.0.

Also if it came with an external power, connect it to the external power before putting on your PC.

This is because the voltage supplied by USB 1.0 is lower than that of USB 2.0 and therefore might not be enough to power up your USB Drive.

After making sure about this, power up your system, and plug the flash drive, then Right-Click on my computer icon, select manage, then go to Disk Management Option.

On the Disk management option Page you should see ALL the drives installed on your system, including the hidden ones, so what you will just do is, try and locate the one representing your flash drive, and right click on it. then select "Change Drive letter and Paths", and give the drive any new, unique letter (i.e alphabet) different from the ones already on your system, and click on OK.

This should make your Hard Drive to be detected automatically.

Kindly keep me posted about the problem

Hope this helps you out.

Goodluck!

yes you can but whether that would make it work or not is a different story.

It depends if the hard drive is still working or not however it would test for certain whether it is working or not.

In XP and Vista no need to install.
They will detect automatically.
To know, goto Windows explorer.
Find drive letter other than your local drive.
Usually called "removable disk".