IBM Travelstar hard drive

if your computer came with a motherboard disc the drivers could be on it
click start control panel administrive tools ,computer management ,device manager look through all of your devices if you see a yellow question mark?or exclamation mark ! or red x
right click to reinstall drivers or
if you can see your usb but its not working
ports(com&lpt)right click update driver
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,
check the USB leads that attach to the motherboard usually red-white-green-black make sure they are securely seated and have no dust build up on them dust will cause static and a lot of unforeseen problems
hope this helps

Can you "read" any files from the external disk-drive?
Can you "delete" any files/folders from the external disk-drive?
Can you click 'File' and 'New' and 'Folder' to create a new folder on the drive?

The warranty on any '20GB' disk-drive ended _years_ ago.

It is time to "retire" that disk-drive -- take a hammer to it, so that any data files on it will _never_ be able to accessed by the F.B.I.,
and buy a new disk-drive.

Unless it's windows 98 you don't need a driver. If your computer can't see it, it's probably broken. Try plugging it in to another computer and see if it can see it

go to the control panel , then open the administrative tool then open the computer management then disk management check the status of hard drive there

it sounds like a hardrive issue. You can have the data retrieved from your hard drive by using this online company that I highly recommend:
http://www.gillware.com/

REmove the hard drive from computer, place it on a caddy and connect it to another computer, try to acces it. If accesible, recover all the data you can if not, download a recovery program from the internet.

In this case you would have to...

1) preformat the drive

2) make it bootable in DOS

3) copy the CD contents to the drive

4) boot the target computer with the drive and run WINNT.EXE in the I386 directory to start the install.

*OR*

1) preformat the drive

2) copy the CD contents to the drive.

3) put the drive in the target computer and boot it from a DOS bootable floppy.

4) run WINNT.EXE in the I386 directory to start the install.

try to check whether the disk jumper is correctly placed then use another os to format the hard disk i.e os win xp

First chek in BIOS if exsist CHANGE HDD PASSWORD if not use download somwhere HIREN BOOT CD v8.2.Let me know if u got help;)