here's what's going on.. I just bought an external HD to replace my old one. my other external HD is 4 years old. i can't move anything into it, but i can take things out of it. the last time i tried that was a few months ago. today, i plug it in, it will not read. but i was able to find it in the device manager. how do i make it so it will read in my computer? any help would be greatly appreciated.
This may be a problem with the disk drive itself. Hook up the drive to your machine. In the Control Panel, go to Administrative Tools, select Computer Management, and on the left hand side select Disk Management under the Storage element. It should describe the state of all the drives hooked up to the machine. This will tell you if Vista even sees a hard drive at the end of the USB and if so what it thinks the drive state is. Another thing to try is to go to http://support.microsoft.com/ and run through the Solution Center. There are some configuration and driver problems that the Microsoft web site will automagically fix on your machine. Do you have access to another computer? You might also want to see if the drive can be accessed there as well.
it won't read in comp management and ive tried it on an older comp in my room and it doesn't read as well.
It really sounds like a drive problem and not a interface or driver issue. One last thing you might try is taking the drive out of the case and installing it in your machine (as long as you have the right internal interfaces). If it's a drive problem, you might have a better chance of eking out a little more use out of the drive to get the important stuff off.