Windows 7: The mystery of the disappearing external hard drive

Here is one for the Hardy Boys, or perhaps one just to go down to the ages, who knows. . .

I've got a 1TB Western Digital external drive that does not show up on Windows 7, but works fine on XP (the only other OS I've tried it on). From what I understood, this was kinda an ongoing issue with Windows 7, and as I have nothing of major importance on that drive, I've just sort of left it plugged in, and ignored it, hoping one day a random Windows Update will make it magically re-appear.

Well, last night, I had a power failure, and after rebooting from safe mode, amazingly, the drive was there! I was able to open the drive, and view the files and folders that were there.

Then, sadly, after another power hiccup, and another reboot, the drive was simply gone again!



Any clue what may be the underlying issue here, and how it can be resolved once and for all?

Though I'd love to have the data from the drive, being without it is not a huge loss, but having an extra TB of storage would certainly be helpful.

Thanks all, as always,

Russell