Help! - External Hard Drive not recognized

W

Webb

New member
I have a 500 gb Western Digital external hard drive that all of a sudden is not showing up under "My Computer". I used to be able to click on My Computer and see drive "I" associated with this external drive. Now all of a sudden, it doesn't appear.

Can someone please help?? That was the drive I kept all of my music files on and now I can't find it. Any suggestions?
 
Sorry...it's usb. I tried a different usb port, different cable, reboot...still not showing up under my computer.
 
What operating system? In W2K and XP you should see the Remove hardware icon near the clock, so try double cliking on it, and see if there is anything that resembles the drive, or an unknown device or anything. If you find something there, try to uninstall it or remove it. Then I would restart with the drive disconnected, and then again with it connected.

BTW is the thing on and runnig? Can you try diferent computer?
 
Windows XP. When I try to reconnect the drive, I get a message that new hardware (WD HD) is found and and ready to use. Also, if I go to Device Manager, I can see the WD drive under 'disk drives'. When I double-click on it, is says the device is working properly. If I then click on Volumes, I get

The volumes contained on this disc are listed below.
Disk: Disk 5
Type: Unknown
Status: Unreadable
Partition style: Not Applicable
Capacity: 0 MB
Unallocated Space: 0 MB
Reserved Space: 0 MB

And I still cannot access the drive.
 
Do you have another drive that's mapped to I? Just double-checking :)

Although that copy/paste from your disk manager is not looking too good.

How was the drive formatted FAT32 or NTFS?
 
Then try driver-> uninstall. then disconnect, reboot, reconnect and see what it does.

Have you had any lightnings recently or automatic actualzations of windows?
And what about some other computer?
 
Tried all of that and still nothing. It was working fine yesterday and we haven't had any lightning/power outages since then. Nothing else mapped to I. And I don't have another computer to try it on here, but I will take it to work with me next week.

So it looks like I'm basically screwed. I just got the drive a couple of months ago too. Thanks for your help.
 
thats bad. Is it under warrenty? Can you check it on another machine to make sure that something is not up on your end?
 
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