External Hard Drive is not recognized in Disk Management or My Computer

  • Thread starter Thread starter Andy.Kuhn
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A

Andy.Kuhn

I have an external Hard disc via an MP3 player. The disc appears to
have failed somehow, and I desire to reformat. However, I am unable to
do so.

1. The computer recognizes the device in the device manager and does
not report any problems.
2. I have tried to roll back the driver, but there is no prior driver
available
3. The HDD does not appear in My computer
4. The HDD does not appear in Disk Management

Question: Is this HDD salvagable. How can I format this disc?

Please help.

Thanks.
 
I have an external Hard disc via an MP3 player. The disc appears to
have failed somehow, and I desire to reformat. However, I am unable to
do so.

1. The computer recognizes the device in the device manager and does
not report any problems.
2. I have tried to roll back the driver, but there is no prior driver
available
3. The HDD does not appear in My computer
4. The HDD does not appear in Disk Management

Question: Is this HDD salvagable. How can I format this disc?

Please help.

Thanks.
Click to expand...
This is a real common problem with XP and USB when using an external drive.
There's at least a dozen different fixes for this and one of them may or may
not work for you.

What can help is if you use TweakUI and assign the external drive a letter
way down the alphabet so XP doesn't get so stupid confused. On a cold boot
or the first time you turn it on in your current session it should be
recognized. Not a good fix, but makes your drive somewhat useable and it
will show up. In order to use TweakUI to assign the letter you likely will
need to turn your system off then boot again to get your drive recognized.
 
How do i rename the drive, if the drive fails to show up on My
computer.

Even after installing TweakUI, the drive fails to be seen.

All of the drive letters from a-z appear under my computer in the tweak
function, however the drive I desire to change does not appear?

any more suggestions?
 
AKMarietta said:
How do i rename the drive, if the drive fails to show up on My
computer.

Even after installing TweakUI, the drive fails to be seen.

All of the drive letters from a-z appear under my computer in the tweak
function, however the drive I desire to change does not appear?

any more suggestions?
Click to expand...
You have to turn your rig off for a bit then restart it with your external
hard drive turned off. After you're booted and Windows settles down, start
your hard drive and it should get detected. You might have to do this
several times trying different USB ports, turning it on and off, etc., until
it gets detected.

Microsoft admits this is a problem and has at least one solution on their
site somewhere. You know how crappy their search works so good luck trying
to find it. I believe it was in their knowledge base somewhere. I saw a
posted copy of what they wrote elsewhere. I tried a lot of fixes and none
worked for me. You can do a Google search about unrecognized external hard
drive and you'll get a lot of results, some with solutions that may work for
you. Good Luck.
 
Tried the last suggestion, the computer always recognizes the device in
the device manager, but never sees it as a hard drive. I have tried
numerous suggestions, the tweakui fix sounded good enough, but again
the hard drive was not recognized in the disk manager and was never
given a drive letter. Prior to malfunction of the hard disc, the
computer recognized my drive as F: and it always appeared in the disk
manager. After disc failure, it appears as if it has become
unsalvagable.

If anyone has more suggestions, I am willing to try them all.
 
I have tried everything I can think of, none of the above had worked.
Anyone have any other suggestions please.
 
On Tue, 21 Mar 2006 14:41:17 -0000, Bob Horvath wrote:

I didn't see all of your post, so I don't know your exact problem, but
I had an external drive that was not working properly, although it was
being seen in my computer and device manager. After tying every thing
under the sun, I removed it from/with device manager, rebooted, and it
worked fine after that. FWIW
 
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