I have an external hard drive that I have hooked up to my computer. I just finished backing up my whole system to this drive and then reformatting my computer back to factory settings. I'm at the point now where I want to start putting all my data back and for some reason my computer isn't showing the external drive. When I turn on the drive XP shows the icon at the bottom right corner saying that the device is connected. If I look at the properties it shows that the device is working properly.

I've never had a problem with this before and its always been a plug and play device with no additional drivers needed.

Has this happened to anyone else? Any way to fix this?

Thank you in advance for any help!

Tim

Hello Relay, Welcome to PCHF.

Did you have a different version of XP before the reformat?

Everything is the same...

This rots... I've got a ton of work on this thing that I need to get back on the computer for tomorrow morning.

I've tried different USB ports and it doesn't make any difference. I found on another site someone that had the same problem and they suggested running: diskmgmt.msc and seeing if its recognized. When I do this I see the c: drive in the top part of the screen and in the bottom part as well but its called Disk 0 in the bottom. I also see my external drive in the bottom part as disk 1, but nothing about it in the top portion of the Disk Management.

Relay, this may be because something is using the drive letter it was previously assigned to. Where you see the disk at the bottom of the screen (in Disk Management), right click on it, and click on Change Drive Letter or Paths, and assign it an available drive letter. You should then see your drive appear in My Comptuter again.

Ok... when I right click on the external one I don't get the same drop down options that I do if I right click on the C drive. It also has the color black on this... which according to disk manager means that its unallocated... does that make any difference?

Right now I have C:, E:, and F:, drives... E and F are CD and DVD drives. I do believe that prior to this reset to factory settings the external drive was showing up as D drive. Though I never paid much attention to it and the drive was rarely on.

err, unallocated means that there is no partition on the disk. Are you sure you haven't accidentally wiped the partition at any point?

No... I have a Dell and after my second time formatting it and dealing with tech support I made step by step instructions. I've used them before and I remember choosing C: to delete the partition and format... resinstall. I don't even think the external drive was powered on at that time. It always seemed like it would get warm after a while and I always tried to keep it off as much as possible.

I just finished doing the windows updates in hopes that maybe there was something missing that the HD needed, but nothing. It still shows in the bottom right corner... its just in the my computer screen that I'm missing it.