Lights on but no one at home

Try connecting the hard drive to some other laptop and see if its getting recognized. Issue could be either with the hard drive itself of it could be with the usb port which you are using to connect the hard drive to your laptop.

If these drives are internally powered by the USB hub, two devices will not be recognised. ie: you can have as many pendrives as you like and they will be seen, because they draw little power from the hub, however, a larger external hard drive requires more power (some of these in fact have two usb connectors to power them). which is why your laptop will only recognise one drive at a time:

Solution: If you can get an externally powered usb drive, this should work.Another and possibly cheaper way would be to get an externally powered USB hub, which would solve the problem

make sure the lead/s that attach to this drive have a secure seating and are not bad/faulty the light on only tells that its getting power it might not be getting enough power you might test the lead/s or
just replace the cable of the hard disk, when you plugged the external disk drive you got that windows could recognize the USB device change the cable everything should work fine again, sometimes the wires inside the cable will be damaged due to bending or stretching or placing heavy equipment upon the cable,
hope this helps

A problem I commonly have is if the external drive is plugged in to a non powered usb hub the unit does not have enough power and will not be recognised, ensure it is plugged directly into the pc tower or if you have a laptop try an alternate usb port as some may not be powered.

If the light won't blink, there could be problem with the power source. Do scanning hardisk for errors manually ( take off the hardisk from the case, assemble it on other PC Desktop)

I have had the same problem with laptops and USB drives. The external drive simply is not getting enough power.

The two solutions that seem to work are:

1) External power adapter for the USB Drive. Many external USB drives have a micro power plug next to or near the USB plug. A 5 Volt adapter (which plugs into the wall OR one that plugs into your cigarette lighter plug in a car) will cure this problem.

2) Some external USB drives come with a plug which has (2) USB plugs which plug into your laptop (laptops typically limit the power for each USB port) and one plug on the other end for your USB drive.

sounds like you are using the wrong power supply. Check the amp output on the power plug you plug into the wall make sure its the same as the amp input of your external harddrive

I had the same problem with my external hdd. I had installed Paragon disk management suite 2009. I ran the program with my hdd plugged in and after sometime(15 minutes) i found my hdd was recognised and working fine. Try it. How it worked for me have no idea but it somehow worked.

if the drive needs an external power source then plug this in. if not then make sure the drive is compatable with your computer and operating system. if it is and there is still the problem then there may be a problem with the drive.

I had the same problem with this hard disk. I have installed paragon disk suite 2009. I ran the software and left it running after sometime it recognised my external hard disk automatically. Dont knw how it happened but worked for me.