Cannot find or format my external hard drive

Try another computer or try another slot on your hook up.

Or go back to basics and make sure your cable is locked in both ends and have power?

Do you see this drive in Bios at Boot but before OS loading?

tried another computer

tried other slots

cables working fine because it comes up under device manager and you can hear it running

i was working on reformatting it to fat32 and i accidently pulled the usb out while it was in an unformatted state. it showed up on swissknife right before i pulled it out

Assuming that you don't have data on this drive that needs to be recovered...

Given that you see it in Device Manager, I suggest that you open Disk Management (oh, that's under Computer Management, is that what you meant?) and find the drive in the picture section at the bottom. See if you can either initialize the drive (right-click on the small square on the left) or, more likely, delete the half-formatted partition (right-click in the stripe on the right), create a new one, and format it.

If there is data on the drive, don't do any of the above, as it will make the data harder to recover.

yeah i tried that but for some reason there is no disk 5 which is where it should be showing up. ive tried plugging it into 6 n so forth and it never shows up under managerment. i can only see it under device manager. i can remove hardware, plug it back in, and windows will find it and install it again as new hardwarew but that doesnt fix the problem.  

i have no data on the harddrive i wish to recover either

Unless it's on an add-on controller chip on the motherboard, like a Marvell chip, I don't know what could be causing it to be seen in Device Manager but not Disk Manager.

Good Day!
I have the same Problem too, my 1 terabyte WD CAN NOT be formatted even it suggest to reformat and even if it says healthy in Device Manager. I dropped it accidentally couple of times but still working, when i deleted some folder it crushed down, when i restarted it its nowhere to find.  

:-(
applevaldez

I have four hard drives with te same problem
  They were NOT shocked
  They CANNOT be seen in disk mannager
  They cannot be seen in my computer
  They are relatively new (1week to 1year old)
I have them hooked up to an extrnal USB to SATA access cord and it is 4 months old with no signs of a amaged cord what so ever. I take care of my things very well so... it works

I suggest you to download Miniaide Magic Partition to manager your disk and paritition. It can solve almost all problems for computer.
http://www.magic-partition.com/products

 
I almost forgot I had posted on this forum.
I actually got the hard drives installed on my computer now, "all of them."
  Lets see if I can remember  

  Oh yeah, I used my Sata to USB cord to connect the hard drives to my laptop and started up the Disk Mannager.
Start>(right click) Computer>Manage>Computer Management>Disk Management
I right clicked on the faided looking drive I wanted to get working and CHANGED THE DRIVE LETTER. I right clicked on it again and here is the part I am not too clear on, I think I selected ENABLE? It was something like that, enable, engage, inituate   yea, I think it was ENABLE.  
After that it was all down hill from there.   I just had to format them and lable them  
Sorry that other posting didn't help, I didn't have Viruses. I got Norton 360 man. I ain't got to worry about no stinking viruses and I didn't have to download another program either. That may help somebody else but I figured it out after about five more hours on my own  

whhaaattt I was here last year, because i got a problem with my Western digital my passport hd..   and i never find a solution but to buy a new WD 1TB hd again.. and now im here again..   same thing happened.. yesterday my hard drive says UNALLOCATED, then fixed it, i created 2 partition, now I cant open the DISK MANAGEMENT i can see it in MY COMPUTER, but i cant use it, i want to reformat it gain but the disk manager is not working,, if i unplug the hd the disk management shows up, then i plug it again and no disk manager again.. huhuhu!  

Or you need other partition managers:
http://www.techsupportalert.com/content/best-free-parti...