Seagate external hard drive

[#1]

I have a couple of external hard drives, one works ok but the seagate is temperamental sometimes it is recognized the first time I switch it one but other times it has to be switched on and off a dozen times or more before the computer detects it.  Once up and running it's fine.
Used on a second computer it always works first time so I suspect that for some reason windows does not recognize it or something is blocking it.
I Have tried changing drive letters,turning of anti-virus scanners and firewall but this makes no difference.
Have looked at the Seagate troubleshooting site and also noted comments in an earlier post about error messages with a Seagate drive but I get no error messages.
It's not showing in device manager until it actually works, then it shows ok with no error messages.
Have tried all the usual stuff of wiggling cables etc but no luck. Connected via usb (tried various other usb ports but no luck)
Anyone any further ideas please ?

[#2]

Why not install it internally?

[#3]

Hi,
Not exactly sure what you mean by installing it internally ?
If you mean physically putting it in my computer this would defeat the purpose of an external drive which you can just unplug and connect to another machine

[#4]

It's just that you said you had a couple of external drives...
Unless the PC recognises that a device has been plugged into a USB port,
Windows doesn't even know about it - same for virus scanners etc etc.
You could always boot from a Linux CD, which will tell you what hardware you have, without harming any data.
If you want to keep moving it between PC's wouldn't it be better set up as a network share?
Obviously depends on what you are using it for.

[#5]

It doesn't sound as if the problem is with the Seagate drive, but with the Windows USB setup on one machine. Two possibilities occur to me -
A) Does the Seagate drive get different drive letters on the two machines? Is the drive letter it gets on the "working" machine in use for something else (CD or DVD) on the one that has problems? In any case I would suggest using disk manager to allocate the same drive letter on both machines. The changing drive letter may confuse things.
B)Windows maintains a list of USB devices it has seen together with details of the drivers so that the second and subsequent times the device is attached it doesn't have to go through the new device routine. It's possible that the list on the misbehaving computer is corrupted, or the entry for the Seagate is bad.
A possible fix is to download a little utility called USBDeview <http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/usb_devices_view.html> It doesn't need installing but it allows you to see all the USB devices that your copy of Windows knows about whether or not they are attached. It will also let you uninstall a USB device whether or not it is attached.
If you download it (without the external device attached), and tick the View/Display disconnected devices option you might find multiple entries for the Seagate drive. You could also look to see if there are any differences in the entries on the two machines.
I would suggest un-installing all the instances and then reconnecting the drive and letting Windows start again.

[#6]

Wisty,
Thanks for your detailed reply.... That's a nifty little program but I have still not managed to sort it.  I will fiddle around a bit more but failing that I guess the answer may be to install the drive internally as suggested earlier.