Hard drive not recognized

Temetatauz

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Oct 25, 2010
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Any help would be much appreciated as Im not a fully aware tech person. I have a WD external HD that was working just fine and is only a few months old. I plugged it into my new laptop to view some photo's, this morning I get up to make copies of photo's for my parents on the old computer and all of a sudden the computer can't detect it in the usb port. I have plugged in to the Laptop and it is not detecting anymore as well. I got a message saying that it is present I just can't get to it??? Any suggestions please???
 

John_VanKirk

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Hello,

What kind of new laptop are you using and what OS does it have? Also what make, model, HDD size and connection system is the external HDD?

Plug the ext HDD system into your laptop, and turn on the external HDD if it has a separate power source. Then boot up your laptop to see if it will recognize the external drive.

Go to the Device Manager and see if it is recognized as a Disk drive, and that it is working properly.
Then go to Disk Management, and in the lower graphical section how is it listed.? Give all the details ie: Disk 1, Basic, Online, 100GB, NTFS, Healthy, etc.

That will give the group a good idea of the problem and the best way to solve it.
 

Earl01

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Dec 18, 2010
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18,510
The instructions below should solve the problems.
Go to the Microsoft icon at bottomleft corner - left click, right click on computer or 'my computer whichever you have, left click on manage, left click on continue, left click on disk management, The drive was listed but I could not select the 'open' function. What I did was select mark as active and then I selected assign a drive letter. The system then assigned the correct drive letter and made the drive available for use. I hope this makes sense to you and you are able to pass this info on to others.
I think this whole problem is caused because the HD manufacturers do not keep up with operating systems.