External Hard Drive installed but not showing up on My Computer

BmBranch said:

I've attached a screen shot of the disk management screen. When right clicking the open option isnt even visible.

Assign a drive letter to the disk (first option shown on your snip). Without a drive letter, your disk will be "invisible".

Dear BmBranch,
I have read about a similar prob.'a while ago!

These probs. are more common when using Laptops which have card readers!

For ex: C:/ is your primary partition,

D:/ is either a logical or a CDrom drive and

E:/ is your Card reader and

the EXTN.HDD fights for the same drive letter as your card reader.

So,assign a drive letter in "Disk management" to the EXTN.HDD by a Rt.click on it,and choose "CHANGE DRIVE LETTER and choose a higher drive letter like M. Reboot and check!

The other scenario is a malware contamination!

Kindly run an online anti-virus scan---> Housecall , for ex. :HouseCall - Free Online Virus Scan - Trend Micro USA,

super antispyware scan with it's PORTABLE SCANNER(as it does not need updating) : SUPERAntiSpyware.com | Remove Malware | Remove Spyware - AntiMalware, AntiSpyware, AntiAdware!

Malware antimalwarebytes(MBAM) : malwarebytes.org

Last but most importantly,run an anti-rootkit : Rootkit Buster http://downloadcenter.trendmicro.com...oc=1#undefined

Let us all know how things have panned out! I hope you hit paydirt!

Regards,
Sreedhav:)

It may be that the USB/ATAPI interface hardware may not have a proper driver built into windows 7. Do you have a different W7 machine you can try it on? Did it come with a driver disk? (I know normally that isn't needed, most USB drives use a VERY small number of interface chips that are well supported)

Could be that a driver update is needed to get full functionality out of that external drive... Might be hard to find one, but start with the drive manufacturer's site, if they don't have anything then we can look up the VID/PID of the USB device and find out what it is then to directly to the chip manufacturers site and see if they have one.

BmBranch said:

what do you suggest I do? I've tried pretty much everything

Dear BmBranch,
see if the EXTN.HDD is detached from it's external casing, that can be set right by attaching it back to the casing! Try it!
Regards,
Sreedhav