Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | I have two external USB hard drives both are Western Digital. My primary use for them is to store my fairly large collection of MP3 music. I have one on a computer in the house and another on a very basic computer in the shop. The computers use Windows.
This has worked fine for some time and I use the one in the shop for my music there while working there. Yesterday I was out in the shop and wanted some music. When I fired up that computer, it would not find the external Hard Drive. It did work with a USB stick that had music on it. For a test I brought that external hard drive into the house to try it with the other computer which was working fine with its hard drive.
When I swapped in the suspect drive, it appeared to work. What puzzled me is that the other drive was still showing as a device. It appeared that I had both Harddrive F and Harddrive G. In checking them each appeared available. Each showed their own folders and files. Some of the music files are the same which made this a bit more confusing.
This had me really confused so I purposely created some small Spreadsheets as a test. I saved one the Hard Drive F, I created another and saved it to Hard Drive G. This all went as expected if both drives were physically connected but only one was connected.
At the moment neither drive is physically connected via USB. Yet one shows on the management tree and is available for both saving and retrieving. It as if the Hard Drive is connected wirelessly. The only explanation I can think of is that the system has made a mirror image on this drive on my internal drive and is saving and retrieving to that image.
Next I plan on taking them both to the shop to see what happens there. That was what started the whole investigation in the first place. With the suspect drive yesterday, that computer couldn't seem to find the External Hard Drive attached to it. The indicator was illuminated so I know it was getting power. A thought was that the cable might be defective. Each cable is unique since the connectors at the drive end are different. The cable that was used in the shop is being used in the house test. |
Confusion with External Hard Drives
