hi guys, thanks to for the replies.

for user account control, i've had it disabled ever since i installed vista, i found it very annoying. i did try enabling it to get the external hd to work but nothing.

as for the BIOS options, i did some things, such as set removable device to top boot priority but other than that, i don't know what i could do. i'm very familiar with the BIOS as i've done a lot of overclocking so if you guys know of any options to make an external hard drive work, that would be great.

btw, do you think that a miscrosoft service might be causing this? maybe there is a specific service (in the services.msc menu) that controls USB external hard drives.

sebastian