Hello
Okay, I'm not a techie and any reply that is posted needs to be in laymans terms please!

I bought an external hard drive over the net. First time I plugged it into my Toshiba Satellite laptop, Windows XP Pro (I have service pack 2, updated) picked it up straight away. I transferred all my music and photos onto it (a lot of info!). It appeared as drive E:. It has an external power source as well. Anyway, next time I switched up it didn't appear in My computer. When I first bought it I plugged it into a USB port and it didn't have a high speed hub and a message kept coming up saying it wouldn't run efficiently, so I went and bought one, but still having the same problems. I went into device manager, uninstalled, redetected it, and it showed up. Now it shows up sporadically but it takes me about half an hour of uninstalling it and trying to detect it again with the hardware wizard. I keep getting a code 10 message and a yellow exclamation mark shows up next to it in device manager.

I don't know if it's something to do with the XP software or a problem with the USB mass storage device itself. I even installed the drivers which came on the CD and it still doesn't work. I haven't been able to try it on another machine as yet and our IT guy at work doesn't come back from holiday for another 2 weeks! Wilbur gave me some advice saying I needed to change over the 'jumpering' from master to cable but I spoke to the company I bought the hardware from and the guy said I would have to open the device to do that and it might cause problems.

I've looked extensively on the net, and tried things including going into disk management (but I didn't need to assign it a drive as it already has one), deleting all my USB devices and using the hardware wizard to redetect them, updated BIOS and SP2, and a few other things suggested on other sites, to no avail!

I've accessed the device at the moment but can't switch my laptop off as I'll lose it again!

Somebody please help, I'm at my wit's end and considering getting a pro in to have a look at it.

Thanks, Helz