i was having the same symptoms, maybe we had the same problem. i went to device manager when i had the drive plugged into a usb port. towards the bottom there was a group called "storage devices" i think, and under it was listed "generic mass storage" or something. it had a red x on the icon. i clicked on it to get to properties, and it said that the device was disabled. i think maybe it did that automatically when i accidentally pulled my drive out of the usb port without going through the "safely unplug hardware" thing that sits in the system tray. anyway, all i had to do was tell it to enable the device, and i'm back in business. hope this helps
jeremy
October 2005