Windows 7 - External Hard drive not recognised

Hello everyone,
Once again i need your help. I have an external hard drive, and a lot of data saved on it. My laptop recognises it, but i can't access it. When i go to device manager and try intialize, it says it is not ready.

Thanks for ur help

Is this a small portable drive or one of the larger ones?
Does it have external power for the external enclosure?
I would also verify the wire you are using.

Hi there
this problem is more common than I suspect you think -- it fortunately is easy to solve

1) Control Panel ====> administrative tools==> computer management ===>disk management

wait for the disk snap in to appear and you should see a list of your drives and DVD's.

You'll see one probably without a partition letter

right mouse click on it and choose ADD -- it will show a dropdown where you can choose a drive letter.

wait a little while and you'll see windows scanning the disk -- then you can acess it again normally.

I often have to do this when switching USB drives frequently between seeveral computers -- I've heard that a more permanent solution exists where you have to assign an id or something -- but my method is easy and always works.

Cheers
jimbo

Sounds very odd, all I have to do is connect the USB cable and voila! Go to Computer and see if you can access from there. I had no initializing to do?