Computer won't recognize my external hard drive

[phuynh]

Hi

I'm desperately need a cure for my external hard drive. I have a 250gb Seagate hard drive inside a Multimedia Maddog external enclosure. Both the hard drive and the enclosure manufacturers doesn't provide any drivers. After I plugged the USB 2.0 enclosure cable into my front Dell Dimension 4550 USB ports and the enclosure AC adapter into the wall outlet. The hard drive seem to be working properly however I could not find the hard drive icon on my computer nor under Computer Management. The weirdess thing is on the right lower corner of the window there is a Safely Remove Hardware icon, from my experience this icon represent hardware like flahdrive, mp3 player, or anything that have a usb connection. Do you have any ideas what is the cause behind all this? Thankyou

phuynh

[caperjack]

Hi

I'm desperately need a cure for my external hard drive. I have a 250gb Seagate hard drive inside a Multimedia Maddog external enclosure. Both the hard drive and the enclosure manufacturers doesn't provide any drivers. After I plugged the USB 2.0 enclosure cable into my front Dell Dimension 4550 USB ports and the enclosure AC adapter into the wall outlet. The hard drive seem to be working properly however I could not find the hard drive icon on my computer nor under Computer Management. The weirdess thing is on the right lower corner of the window there is a Safely Remove Hardware icon, from my experience this icon represent hardware like flahdrive, mp3 player, or anything that have a usb connection. Do you have any ideas what is the cause behind all this? Thankyou

phuynh

a little more info need ,like has it ever worked ,also is the usb hdd partitioned and formated .

[BinaryMayhem]

after you plug it in, what do you see listed in device manager?
do you have network drives?
what version of windows is this?

right click my computer > manage > device manager
do you see anything with a yellow ? or something. can you list the items you see in there?

also move down to disk management (its under storage)

if you have networked drivers, some times windows assigns the new drive a letter that allready exisits as a mapped drive. do you see any active partitions that do not have a drive letter or share a drive letter? if you do you can click change drive letter. select a letter that is not in use.
(this is very common in windows)

you could also try clicking on safely remove hardware and eject it. then plug it back in again and see what happens.