For a few years now, I've had two usb HDDs attached to my computer with XP OS. Just the other day, one of them died and I replaced it with a new drive -- almost exactly the same as the original one. When I first attached the new drive, it was recognized fine as 'new hardware found.' And it seems to function okay with one exception... when I first boot my system (or re-boot it), the new drive is not recognized (or at least it doesn't show up in 'My Computer.') However, if I pull the usb cable from the port and re-insert it, the drive shows up after a few seconds. I can't figure out what's going on and it's a little confusing because everything is connected exactly the same as drive I replaced. By the way, the new drive did not come with an installation disk or drivers, so it must just be using universal system drivers. And the drive is also a combo unit -- both usb 2.0 and 3.0. Anyway, just wondering if anyone has any thoughts as to how I can get it to boot up correctly? Thanks.
Try with the USB disk connected to another USB 3 port. All USB 3.0 disks are backward compatible with USB 2.0.
The failure-to-enable-at-boot factor had me think of this: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/strange-bluetooth-problem-in-windows-10.390846/ How is/was your BIOS set---to defaults?
Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try this, but it probably won't help much. I only have usb 2.0 on my system and everything is connected an configured exactly the same as with the old drive I replaced. That's what's so confusing. Both the original drive and the replacement drive are Western Digital 'My Books.' The only difference is the new drive is 3TB -- the old one was 2TB. And the new drive came with a usb 2.0/3.0 combo cable (which I haven't really seen before), but I'm still just using the usb 2.0 cable that I originally had. I can certainly try changing that cable, but I don't see where that would make much difference.