IT support

I have a Smartdisk Firelite 80MB external hard drive (USB) that I used to back up my Windows XP machine. The XP machine is now down and I can't get it restarted. So now I need to restore some files from the Firelite to my Windows Vista machine. When I plug the Firelite into the Windows Vista machine USB port, nothing happens. So I figure I need new drivers. The company website, www.smartdisk.com doesn't come up. There are some websites that promise to update my drivers, but they want to sell me their driver update software. Does anyone here have any suggestions?

Thank you.

I had almost the same thing happen to me. I solved the problem by taking my Firefly (20GB) drive and a thumb drive to the library and cycled the files through one of their computers, which was still running XP.

Exactly how much "nothing" is happening here?

• Does it not power up at all?
• Does the light come on but the drive doesn't spin?
• Does it make a lot of loud clicking noises?
• Does the drive come up in Device Manager?
• If it does, does it show up in Unknown Devices or Drives?
• Does the drive show up in Disk Management?
• Have you tried a different USB cable?

Verbatim bought Smartdisk a couple years ago, so you can look there for drivers, but USB drives shouldn't usually need them. (I am surprised that smartdisk.com doesn't redirect to verbatim.com, though.)