External hard drive not working with Windows 7

Got a Acer laptop with Windows 7 for Christmas and previous had a computer with Windows XP. I had a external hard drive that when ever I connect to the computer it is automatically detected and will come up in My Computer. I went to connect my external drive last night and nothing as happened apart from whenever I connected the computer made a noise that something had been connected but there is nothing in My Computer. Any ideas what is wrong

Type 'Partition' into Windows Search, then your external hard drive should show as 'Disk 1'? Right click that and click 'Change letter and drive'. Change it to say D:/ and hopefully it should show in Windows Explorer.

This has not worked. Any other suggestions

test all ports. if that fails than try formatting your drive on xp than connect it to win 7

Sometimes external USB drives require a power adapter as well as a USB feed, or they fail to spin properly or at all... the problem afflicts notebooks more commonly than PC's and can normally readily be cured by examining and optimising the connections to the external drive

I do apologies but Im not great at the technical side of things on computers. How do you test all ports?

mccann88 said:

I do apologies but Im not great at the technical side of things on computers. How do you test all ports?

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If you plug in a flash drive, a iPod for example, a message comes up on the PC saying it has detected new hardware.

I have another suggestion, insert the external hard drive into you PC and if necessary, connect it to power. Then type Disk Management and right click your external drive, if it says 1TB look for a hard drive with 1TB or 950GB, and select 'Make Active', then 'Select Letter Drive, and for the sake of argument, call it 'Z:/'. Does the computer now recognise the hard drive?

External Drive

disconnect the external drive reboot your pc reconnect the external drive to a different USB port and see what happens