PCMCIA card is not detecting external drive, but mouse works

Question

I'm using a Lenovo 3000 Y500 laptop. All four ports are not working.

I bought a PCMCIA card for USB. Through an USB charger I supplied power to the PCMCIA card. Now it is detecting the mouse and pen drive, it shows the message "UNRECOGNIZED DEVICE FOUND" for my external drive. When I checked "update driver", it shows the "DRIVER NOT INSTALLED" message.

The light is blinking on the hard disk, so it has power, but it's not showing anything in Windows Explorer. After some time it is showing the device type as "Initio driver controller"

I already wasted two months by repairing the USB ports. Finally it turned out to be a motherboard problem, and now PCMCIA is not supporting the external hard disk

Answer 1

"Through an USB charger I supplied power to the PCMCIA card"

I'm not sure what you are meaning by this. Is this a power connector supplied with the card that pull power from a USB port or something you've obtained seperately?

External drives sometimes need more power than is provided by a single standard USB port (up to 2.5W: 5V at up to 500mA), so if your PCMCIA USB card is pulling power from a single USB port so it can provide power to devices plugged into it, then it may not be supplying enough juice to the external drive for it to be able to spin up properly.

[I'm assuming the external drive is a 2.5" or 1.8" one that does not have its own mains power supply, if that is not the case then you need to provide more detail in your question including that info]