Hard Drive Not Recognized

[moishy]

My Western Digital External Hard Drive is not coming up in my computer.
Though it is recognized in Disk Manager.

What can I do?

[Stang02GT]

What operating system are you using?

[Nepomuk]

Could it be, that there are no partitions on that drive? In that case, xome OSes will not show it immediately.

Greetings,
Nepomuk

[moishy]

What OS are you using?

I am using Windows XP.

The reason might be because you don't have any partitions

If that's the case, what would be the solution?

[Nepomuk]

I am using Windows XP.

If that's the case, what would be the solution?

Go to the Control Panel, choose Administrative Tools and Computer Management. Then navigate to Disk Management as shown here: In my case, it's just showing one Volume, but if there's more than one hard drive and/or Partition in your Machine, it should show more. If you have an entry, which doesn't have a partition on it (between Disc 0 and CD-ROM 0 in the bottom part of the screen), then you can right click on it and choose to create a new partition.

If it's another problem however (e.g. your other hard drive not showing up here either), then it will be something else. If so, have you done anything specific with the drive lately? Was it recognised before? Or have you maybe only just bought it?

Another possibility would be, that there IS a partition on it, but in a Format Windows doesn't recognise (although in that case, it should actually show under "My Computer", I think).

Greetings,
Nepomuk

[Curtis Rutland]

Moved to Windows Forum.

[spycon]

it might be that the partitions your hard drive are not in "fat32" or "ntfs" formats which are recognised by windows.

if this is the case the you should use a partition editor like one listed on Wikipedia to convert partitions to fat32 or ntfs formats

[Banfa]

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Banfa
Administrator

[Banfa]

moishy,

If you do need to do disk partitioning not supported by the Windows disk manager then it may be worth googling the GParted Live CD.

This is a Linux live cd that has the GNU disk partitioner (GParted) on it.

However I would fully investigate the solutions suggested in post 5 first.