Comp stopped recognizing WD USB drive.

[JCB]

I did a build for my cousin which included a WD Dual option USB HD (model WD1600B011-RNN) I did the build, installed WIN XP home and installed AOL and some other common progs. I installed the retrospect backup software that came with the drive and configured it for incremental backups and everything worked great until a week later. I stopped back by her house to install a multi-card reader and I powered up the drive just to see if it was still working......and it wasnt. The comp would no longer recognize the drive and the WD button manager icon that appeared in the system tray was gone. I re-booted the comp and noticed that the WD button manager icon breifly appeared then disapeared upon booting. I uninstalled and re-installed all of the software but no luck. I can no longer get this thing to work on her comp and I am at my wits end. I have searched WD's knowledge base for this problem but have come up empty handed. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!!

[pam123]

If all your cousin's usb ports check out as live will that drive work in another computer running XP?
If you start the computer with the drive disconnected and connect it later is it recognized then?
If the drive is dead then rma it, if it's live but the usb ports are the problem try a repair install of XP. If that doesn't work then the problem is with the motherboard especially if you used the usb headers for the front of the case.
If the ports are fine and the drive works and is recognized then something on that computer is disabling the backup software.
So you would have to shut down start up applications (one at a time please) since the back up program loads to the system tray at start up, to find out where the conflict is.