This morning i was booting up my comp and unhooking some stuff from the power strip, and my computer started saying that my 120 gn harddrive was dirty (it always says that, nothing is really wrong with it) and when it was about 22% complete, i accidentally unplugged that instead of my sister's hard-drive... It then said some stuff about not responding and deleting entries. Now i cannot get it to respond in the my comp. menu. I went into the registery, but i do not know which area it would be in (hardware i know, but i need to check some more). Does anyone have any way to fix it?

P.S. I finally know where some of my games keep the C.D. key . I went and looked in software, and i saw that the C.D key was a sub entry in some of the files .

cool. Just be carful in the registry.

Clarification, 1: how many disks? Two, do any of them boot?

Lol, i am not going around changing everything i see, lol, just trying to find the correct hardware area. I already tried the device manager, that doesn't know its even there. And i have the built in Maxtor, and my Wester Digital 120 gb hd hooked up. The maxtor is pretty much the only one that normally is running, i hook up the other one later (usually).

Also, the Western Digital is a plug and play HD.

I am going to try a restart again but this time leave it hooked up.

ok, try going into your disk managment tool and issue the rescan disks command (in XP: Action: Rescan Disks). If you don't know where disk managment is, it is in the Computer Managment Console (or you can use the mmc)

I had no idea what you were talking about, but i googled it and I have it up, i am now going to do what you said.

ARGHHHH! Its still not working. did rescan disk, but i still do not have my portable HD up.

EDIT: I decided to hook it up via firewire instead, and now its WORKING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Superb. May I recommend you back up imperative files for just such a case? It's good it had the alternative interface though...

There are no imperative files on there, just my games so they do not take up space on our main computer. I think that maybe once i do some utilities (reg first aid, defreag, cleanup etc. ) it might recognize the usb again (isn't firewire faster than even usb 2.0 anyways?) .

Firewire is faster, yes.

Sounds like you either have a corrupted driver, or the usb interface in the hd enclosure just died. Can you try plugging it into a *nix box or another windows box?

firewire is slower than usb2.0, yes (firewire = 400mbit, usb2.0 high speed = 480mbit - both are the max theoretical speeds, however, not necessarily what you will hit)

there is the newer firewire 800 which can hit close to 800mbit, but as it was just introduced by Apple in 2003, there are extremely few firewire 800 peripherals (or PCs that support it)

Is it? I guess that's right. And in theory 802.11n will be as fast as the theoretical speed of USB2.0, although somehow I don't see that actually happening.

is it that high now, I hear higher than CAT5, but not there.