cardinal23 wrote on Jun 16th, 2009 at 4:06pm:TWO Seagate FreeAgent USB 2.0 drives.
Hava good friend who has one. Good drives. She also has it connected to a Dell .. a 4-year old laptop. None of your problems.
Very weird. I would think, intuitively it has something to do with the laptop instead of the external drive. (Could be wrong, tho.)
My external (Seagte but not FrreAgent) have a little blue power button I sometimes need to push to power-on the sucker. Then it comes to life as it spins up and voila .. Windows sees it.
Can you hear/feel it spinning?
What about putting a shortcut to the drive(s) on your desktop to dbl-click to "wake up" the drive(s)??