Windows 7 does not detect multiple External Hard Drives

Anonymous

I have recently purchased a HP Pavilion laptop Winndows 7 Home Premium. I have two 500 GB external Hard Drives. When I connect them individually to the system, they are recognized and I can copy files from/to to these external Drives. But when I try to connect both at the same time, Windows 7 does not detect the drive I connect second. Any help is greatly appreciated.

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Anonymous

If you are still having the problem detecting the 2nd external hard drive, then I would like to share with you that I have also experienced the same problem when I tried to connect 3 external Seagates 500Gigs each, and each of the HDs with their own power supply.I would like to also share with you, if you are still having the problem, that I have been able to connect and my Windows 7 Pro has been able to detect all 3 external HDs and each drive has its own letter assigned to it.Each external drive (ED) is accessible like if nothing ever happened.The issue seems to be a conflict of IDs assigned to each (ED) when we connect an (ED), then when we connect a 2nd (ED), then the 2nd (ED) is trying to use an ID that has already been assigned to the 1st (ED), therefore, the 2nd (ED) stays "offline" to avoid a conflict with the 1st (ED).The technical term is "The disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online"To make the 2nd and 3rd, and 4th (ED) to be online, then you have to go to:- Computer Management- Disk Management- Scroll down so you can see your external drives- You will notice that the 1st (ED) is "Online"- You will notice that the other (EDs) are "Offline"- Right-Click on "Offline" and a shortcut menu will give the option to turn (ED) "Online"- Wait for a few seconds and now that (ED) will become available to be used.I hope these findings will help you guys minimize your frustrations as I had them before I found this solution.

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Anonymous

If the drives are powered by the USB bus and do not have their own external power supplies the problem is that the laptop is not supplying sufficient USB power to drive both.

The USB specification is that each port should supply 500mA at 5V. To conserve their batteries, laptops usually provide 500mA to be shared between all the available ports. If you need to use several USB devices with significant power requirements you need either an external powered USB hub or to provide the devices with their own power supplies.

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62 additional answers

Anonymous

2011-06-21T14:43:57+00:00

This is the solution I have been looking for and I assume others have been looking for as well. Thank you so very much!
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Anonymous

2011-06-18T07:10:52+00:00

Thank you a bunch. This works just like you described. You saved me a lot of work.
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Anonymous

2011-05-30T15:20:06+00:00

Thank you. Your advise cleared up my problem of conflicting external HDD addresses. After taking these steps the "conflicting drive" was assigned its own unique drive letter "H".... seems weird that this conflict only arose on my two 3G USB3 external drives but not on my 3G USB3 + smaller size USB2 drives that are also plugged in externally. I think it may be that during setup (plugging in the 2nd USB3 drive) my anti-virus SW may have blocked some form of registry change related to mapping the new HDD into the system ... which I had not noticed at the time... I am using Trend Antivirus SW from DELL
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