Windows 7 USB drive: Please insert disc

Lynnzer

New Member
I'm about off my head with frustration here.
I know there are a lot of others who seem to have bumped into this particular problem but I haven't found any successful answer as yet.
My desktop machine has a USB hard drive, 3.5 inch in a case, with a capacity if 1tb which I use as a storage medium of my video and music collections. This is seen as drive J and is working fine.
I have recently bought another 2.5 inch laptop drive in a case for USB back-ups of stuff I can't afford to lose. I had a major disaster not so long ago and lost a complete hard drive so want to ensure a good back-up.
Anyway, the drive is supposed to be plug and play and is sold as this sort of thing, ie a back-up drive.
When I pop it into a USB port it shows as drive M which I've named it so that I can remember it easily, but when I point my cursor to it in My Computer it comes up as "There is no disc in Drive M. Insert a disc and click Continue" Drive M isn't in use by anything else.
Well there's 650gb floating around there somewhere.
When I try to populate the disc from choosing it in Device Manager, it shows 0MB.
If I look at it from partitioning tools it shows as no drive capacity.
Yet, when I pop it into my Laptop USB port it gives me the option of using it for storage, backups etc and allows full unimpeded use and in fact I have transferred quite large numbers of stuff over to it. I still can't access it from Win 7 on my desktop though. My laptop also uses win7 so I can't see where the problem lies.
I have another hard drive installed in my desktop and that is exactly the same. The damn thing just doesn't show any size in it when selected.
I feel slightly embarrassed now as I returned another back-up drive that showed the same problem as being faulty.
PLEASE, what the hell is going on here and how can I mend it?
 
When you plug the drive in, do you get the notification? Have you tried different USB ports?

You might try not putting a drive letter on it and just letting the system assign it a drive letter.

Did you put the drive in the laptop prior to using it on the Desktop?

Have you looked at Disk Management with the drive installed, and it also shows no capacity? Any Red marks on the left end of the graphic?

How did you disconnect the drive from the system, safe disconnect?

Is the drive self-powered or just uses USB power from the computer?
 
When you plug the drive in, do you get the notification? Have you tried different USB ports?

You might try not putting a drive letter on it and just letting the system assign it a drive letter.

Did you put the drive in the laptop prior to using it on the Desktop?

Have you looked at Disk Management with the drive installed, and it also shows no capacity? Any Red marks on the left end of the graphic?

How did you disconnect the drive from the system, safe disconnect?

Is the drive self-powered or just uses USB power from the computer?

1. No notification when plugging in. It's a USB2 device and that's where it's plugged in.
2. It did assign a drive letter originally but that was showing the same lack of size and no disc inserted problem.
3. Tried using it on the desktop first then when nothing worked plugged it directly to my laptop which picked it up perfectly. As I said, I have copied stuff into it from the laptop so it's not as if the disc is actually 0mb. It's that my desktop doesn't think there's a disc in it.
The picture shown tells the story. I have 3 hard drives installed, another on a USB port that already works well (this is the normal drive size for a desktop), a flash drive for transfer of stuff from my other devices and of course the DVD drives, with Disc 6 M: the problematic drive.
It looks completely blank on the disk management tools. OH, it looks to be set as MBR boot or whatever.
Just had a thought. I'll try and run it in Knoppix to see what it says about the drive. Will post back back on that when I get time to do it.
Disc M.PNG

Another thing: I've just put it back onto my laptop and it shows as drive ELEMENTS :E
Wondering if the conflict with an existing E may be the problem.
 
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Let's go over your configuration. If I mention something, do not assume something is wrong, just something I am thinking about.

You have one of your 1 TB drives set as Spare which contains your boot files (D: ).

You have a 1 TB drive for just data storage, E:

You have a 2 TB drive which is your Windows Install.

Your External 1 TB drive is J: This drive is USB? And you have an active partition on it.

Then you have drives 3 and 6 or K: and M: that are both showing no media. Since M is the one you are working on, what is K? Do you have some type of memory card slots on some device, like a printer, or on your Desktop?
 
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