Hello and USB upgrades

Hi - I'm new here. I have had my Aspire for about two years and it seems to be functioning fine. The other day I bought a Toshiba external hard drive to store a huge backlog of work documents (real estate). The unit came with a 3.0 usb cord that says compatable with a 2.0. It plugs in fine. It even lights up saying it has power. However, the drive does not show up as a device or a destination. When I open my computer all that shows up is the Acer drive and the internal CD. This is an Aspire 5734Z. Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to upgrade my port with a downloaded drive? Or do I need to install a physical new port? BTW the manual is 34 pages of 14+ different languages but the only "setup instructions" are a sketch of a laptop, a cord and a drive. Thank you! Lou

Accepted answers

All comments

finlux

Hi Lou!

Have you tried a different USB port? If this makes no difference, press Windows key and R to bring up the Run box, and type diskmgmt.msc and click on the result.

Check to see if your Toshiba drive is listed. If it is, right click on it, and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths", then click "Change". Select a Drive letter, say T (for Toshiba) then click OK. This should now "activate" the drive.

If your drive is not seen in the Disk Management screen, then try to use a different USB cable. If this fails, then there may be a problem with the drive itself. Can you try it in another computer?