External Drives Won't Show Up

Hi, I have a 1 year old Macbook running Snow Leopard. Recently my external harddrives stopped showing up when I plug them in. I went to finder preferences and made sure they should show up on my desktop. I tried reformatting and repartitioning one of my jump drives through disk utility because it showed up there but it still does not work. I have tried 4 different drives and none of them show up on my computer but they do show up on other computers so it is something wrong with the computer. The USB ports do work however, because I am able to print through them. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Printing through a USB port does not require power, only a signal. Printers are self powered. However, when attaching a hard drive, it must derive its power through the USB port. If you attach a self powered hard drive to one of the ports, does it work?

It does sound like your problem is not enough power is getting to the USB ports on your MacBook.

Regards.