Hello-
I recently re-imaged my laptop (WIN XP home) and am now having problems getting my Maxtor external drive to be recognized. I am using a USB 2.0 adapter PCI card (made by ST Labs / NEC). The card is recognized in the "hardware wizard", however, when I plug the hard drive into the card, and turn it on, nothing happens. I have downloaded and installed whatever drivers I THINK I need for BOTH the drive and the card. I DO have XP service Pack 2 installed, but I'm not sure if this is the issue.

Can someone please offer some suggestions?

You should not have needed any special drivers for a USB 2.0 device under Win XP. My recent USB drive was also "missing in action" after being attached. The installation manual neglected to mention one small detail: To make sure the drive is flagged as "removable".

Open your Windows device manager to see if the drive shows up under "disk drives". If so, examine the properties for the USB drive and see if you have a "removable" check box. A USB external drive should have a check in this box. Reboot and see what happens.

Hello there again.

Perhaps not 100% perfect compatibility problem, try restarting your computer with the USB drive already plugged in and powered, try to avoid daisy chainning your USB connections or mixing types... ie, USB_1.1 device - USB_2.0 device - USB 1.1 device ---