My laptop won't read my hard drive

[mrantoine]

I have a laptop that will not read my external hard drive. when i say it doesnt read i mean if you go to disk management you will see a drive with the 500 gb memory but i have movies on this drive. it will not show up in the my computer section either. my other computers can read so can my media player so why can't my laptop read it. its in fat32

 

[nhasian]

I didn't understand you clearly. In the Disk Management can you see the external drive? If not then you should check your usb drivers. if it is seen in Disk Management, right click on it and see if you can assign it a drive letter.

 

[mrantoine]

Yes I can see it. It says it 480 something gb and everytime I try to change the letter it gives me this error saying that disk management cant view needs to refresh page or restart disk management

 

[dodger46]

Try here to see if it helps
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/external-hard-drive-is-not-accessible-access-is/e4fd2e7e-ec07-47c9-8677-e4be071e6122

 

[mrantoine]

I tried that but it still won't help cause it doesn't have a volume letter and it will not let me assign it one. everytime i try to do anything in the disk management it just gives me the message that the the operation failed because the console is not up to date please refresh console view

 

[travalon]

try disconnecting the frive, check dsk mgmnt and seei if its still there. if it is see if you can remove it from the console. if not plug it in. if you can't get to it there's a setting somewhere to make this disk "ACTIVE" this is what I've had to do on occasion.

 

[dodger46]

I tried that but it still won't help cause it doesn't have a volume letter and it will not let me assign it one. everytime i try to do anything in the disk management it just gives me the message that the the operation failed because the console is not up to date please refresh console view

How's about transferring your movies to one of the machines that can read it, preferably one that is running Win7, and format the drive NTFS. Check that your drive can now be 'seen' on your laptop, restore your movies...