Cant access my hard drive

[MoeMan_50]

Hi, I'm having trouble accessing my hard drive.
Whenever I plug in my hard drive, it lights up (so it's on, and running) but it wont show up on my computer. What can I do? I have important files on it.

Thanks!

 

[iansaggers]

have you looked in disk management?
right click on my computor>manage>disk management.
sometimes you need to activate hdd's in there.

 

[mahakavi]

have you looked in disk management?
right click on my computor>manage>disk management.
sometimes you need to activate hdd's in there.

How do you activate it? I have a similar problem and I went to disk management. The external HD has a memory of 298 GB and it says the free space is 298 GB. Does it mean all the data are wiped out? Till yesterday it had data amounting to 150 GB. Is it possible to activate it? Can the data be recovered?