How to get an External Hard Drive to show up in WinXP SP2 again?

December 18, 2005 3:26 PM

How can I get an External Hard Drive to show up in WinXP SP2 again?

I have a 60GB Western Digital hard drive in an ADS tech USB enclosure. It worked up to a few days ago, when it abruptly stopped showing up in My Computer. The drive was assigned disk letter I:, which is still skipped by all my other devices (iPod, Canon printer, etc.). The drive shows up in Device Manager as a 60GB Usb Device under Drives, but does not show up in the Disk Management utility.

So... why isn't this showing up in My Computer? The drive is formatted and is less than 20% full, I'd imagine. It's mostly used for data backups and disk images of files I'd need if I had to reinstall Windows.

posted by mdbell79 to computers & internet (4 answers total)

If you have a desktop you could take it out of the enclosure and attach it regularly to see if the problem is with the enclosure or the drive.

People seem to be having similar problems here.
posted by null terminated at 4:53 PM on December 18, 2005

Try plugging it into a different USB port on the back of your computer.
posted by BrandonAbell at 5:31 PM on December 18, 2005

First thing is to check if it is showing up under disk manager. If it is assign a drive letter if it doesn't have one. If I is associated set a different drive letter.
posted by Mitheral at 7:17 PM on December 18, 2005

I had the same problem with my 250 Gig Western Digital in an ADS USB enclosure. In my case, the disk suddenly started showing as unformatted in the management console and the data was inaccessible. Right click on My Computer and select Manage to bring up the Management console and select disk management to show all your disks.

Fortunately Testdisk was able to find the partition and work it's magic with no difficulty.

I still don't know the reason for the problem. It seems to have temporary hiccups now. The drive is a month old and may just be flaky. I plan to to install it in the internal bay and cross my fingers.
posted by euphorb at 2:03 AM on December 19, 2005