My 2 yr old emachine laptop running XP is supposed to be plugNplay but it doesn't recognize a USB 120 Gig External Storage device when I plug it in. It recognizes flash drives fine, USB printer, and other devices tho. Just not large external storage devices (I've tried 3 different ones).

Thru some finnessing, I can get the drive to show up in Disk Management, and even access and transfer information to and from it, but it still wont show up in My Computer. All my USB ports work fine, and the External Storage devices pop right up when plugged into a desktop also running XP.

After searching other boards and trying other info, I've reset the BIOS, tried reformatting and re-partitioning the drives, but none of the suggestions have worked. It just wont show up in My Computer. It won't reformat giving me the error "The operation did not complete because the partition or volume is not enabled. To enable the partition or volume, restart the computer". Of course, restarting doesn't change anything.

The drives are showing up in Disk Management as Drives, and not as Removable Storage, so it isn't just a matter of "enabling" them.

Any suggestions? The tech support for the drive told me it was my computer's problem and the tech support for e-machines told me that it was probably because my laptop only has USB 2.0 ports, not Highspeed USB 2 ports. Yeah, right. OK, so basically they weren't any help at all.

I'm sure somebody's got the answer to this one! Thanks thanks thanks. Its driving me crazy.

I would say that you are definately correct in saying Emachines doesn't know what the hell they are talking about (I own one unfortunately). Also I would think that you need an update for the bios to support the larger usb drives but I'm pretty sure Emachines doesn't have one available yet. They are about a year behind when it comes to updates.

find out what I/O controller they use see if you can get better drivers
I have done this with gateway product
can you see a letter assigned to the drives if not give'm a letter