External HDD Not Recognized

Hello everyone,

I have a weird problem, and I was hoping that maybe some of you would be able to help me fix it. I have an external 250g hard drive, and I’m using usb 2 to connect the hdd to my laptop. My laptop is an HP Pavilion dv4000 17’’ widescreen. It is running a dual boot system with Windows XP Pro and Ubuntu Linux

The weird thing is that only sometimes it is not recognized. It happened a few times last night, but after the third or fourth try it worked. Now this morning when I tried connecting the two, I haven’s had any success.

I get the following box that pops up in xp pro:

One of the USB devices attached to this computer has malfunctioned, and windows does not recognize it.

Thanks in advance for any help :smiley: