Problem with USB portable hard drive -

I was recently running a 4 port USB hub, but it was usb 1.1. only, so after advice here I bought a PCMCIA USB 2.0 4 port which I have plugged into the side of my laptop. This means I can now attach my mouse, printer and 2 USB external hard drives.

Except it is only finding one of the drives. Why won't it find the other? The green light is on on the hard drive - so there is power.

When I plug it in I hear 2 noises one straight after the other. These are the Windows noises for recognising hardware that's just been plugged in - a digital sort of "uh-huh" (kind of affirmative, yup something's just plugged in), but then straight after I get the "uh-uh" (kind of negative, it's been unplugged again noise) although I haven't unplugged it.

In other words it's like it is spotting it but then disactivating it straight away.

Why is this?

EDIT: a strange thing that happens is when I unplug it and plug it back in, the autoplay function opens and it presents the contents of the other hard drive. Could they both be assigned to drive F with one masking the other? How would I separate them?

If I unplug the 'real' drive F hard drive, and just have the other hard drive in nothing happens though. It used to be drive E.

Drive lettering sequence all depends what happens is removable drives are given the next logical letter available therefore if you plugged the one that used to be e into the usb 2 device its looked and seen it as a new device and added it to f next in sequence and so on, as for only seeing one drive when both plugged in how are the drives powered via the usb or additional power sometimes a drive requires more than the usb allows for and needs a lil extra juice so to speak.

get me the make and model of your stuff again and will see what i can figure out for you screen shots would help aswell

just going away for a couple of days - will be in touch when I get back though - thanks for offer of help!!

No probs