External harddrive not showing up

As the title suggests I have a hard drive that isnt showing up. Its a seagate 500 gb.

The thing lights up and everything and it shows up in disk management without a letter. From what I've read from various help threads, I'm supposed to right click it and change the disk letter or something but the problem is that it all the options are greyed out

I took out this harddrive and plugged in my other WD 750 gb to see if it do the same thing but the WD harddrive already had a letter automatically assigned and did nothave the change letter option grey out.

any thoughts?

Does the drive show up in DISKMGMT, and is it ONLINE or OFFLINE?

Does it show a file system on it (e.g. NTFS) and size/capacity? Or does it show RAW?

it shows the size/capacity but it doesnt show the file system. it does show up in diskmgmt though and it does say online.
i've attached a screenshot if that helps

If disk management won't play ball, I'd be inclined to try Partition Wizard to delete the partitions on the drive, and then creating another one.

This tutorial explains how: Partition Wizard : Use the Bootable CD

Just boot into Partition Wizard when you've created your boot disc, delete the existing partitions, repartition your drive, format it, and then apply the changes before booting back into Windows. You can carry out each operation singly then apply or you can stack them, and then apply the changes.

bethalinax56 said:

it shows the size/capacity but it doesnt show the file system. it does show up in diskmgmt though and it does say online.
i've attached a screenshot if that helps

It's very curious that you have an EFI System Partition on that drive.

Did you ever FORMAT the drive to NTFS when you first bought it? Or is this just "out of the box" and you are simply trying to use it? Was this drive formatted by a Mac?

Here's an interesting article from someone else with what sounds like the exact same problem as yours. Also an EFI System Partition present, and also the other partition unavailable in Windows with no drive letter assigned.

Is there anything actually on the big partition on that drive? Or has it NEVER actually been usable?

If you have nothing to preserve on that drive, I'd take Seavixen32's advice and (a) use Partition Wizard to delete everything on that drive so that all 500GB is available as "unallocated", and then (b) use Partition Wizard to create a brand new NTFS partition using the whole drive if that's what you want (or you can create several NTFS partitions the same way).

That should do it I would think.

eh..I was hoping there was some way to get it to work without installing anything. I'm not particularly computer savvy so..yea

The harddrive is actually my friend's (who uses a mac) so maybe thats why. I kind of assumed harddrives could just go from one comp to another lol
and I have a bunch of graduation photos and vids for school in there lol

bethalinax56 said:

eh..I was hoping there was some way to get it to work without installing anything. I'm not particularly computer savvy so..yea

We're only suggesting Partition Wizard as a "guaranteed" way to wipe that drive clean and then create one or more NTFS partitions as you want. This is probably THE most reliable, dependable, and easy-to-use 3rd-party product there is for this particular need. And it is very easy to install onto your Windows system, consisting virtually of doing nothing more than running the downloaded installer file.

The harddrive is actually my friend's (who uses a mac) so maybe thats why.

Ok, now the truth comes out.

I kind of assumed harddrives could just go from one comp to another lol

Not if that large partition is formatted with a Mac-only file system. Mac and Windows are NOT super-compatible.

and I have a bunch of graduation photos and vids for school in there lol

Well you won't be able to get them off I don't think, since the file system on that partition is obviously unknown to Windows but rather only to his Mac.

How about your friend copying them onto a DVD for you, being sure you can read that DVD on your Windows machine? Experiment with one or two files first, just to be sure the project will be successful. If so, then use that method for transferring the stuff off of that drive to your own Windows machine.

Alternatively, you can use an external USB flash drive or SDHC card instead of a DVD. Again, your friend can simply copy those JPG, MPG, AVI, etc. files to the external USB device. But these external USB drive/devices are just like real discs (internal or external) and need to be first formatted say with NTFS or FAT32 for compatiblility with Windows. Again, you should then try to read one of them plugging that USB device into your Windows machine to be sure you can read it. USB pen drives and SDHC/SDXC flash cards are very inexpensive and come in sizes ranging from 4GB all the way up to 64GB, so they're much larger in size than DVDs and don't require a "burner" drive on the source machine.