Windows 7: External hard drive not recognized on anything other than device mgr

My WD Elements external hard drive was working great until one day it failed to be recognized in explorer. I've tried it on multiple PC's and it does the exact same thing. It shows up in device manager as properly working and also even shows up in devices and Printers and BIOS and Windows will allow me to eject it. I've tried using Recuva to recover my data but the disk still doesn't show up. I can't use CHKDSK because it doesn't have a drive letter. Is there anything I can do? and more importantly, is there any way I can recover my important data from this drive?

Have you gone into the Disk Management tool to see if simply right clicking on the volume to change drive letter would initialze the drive again? The drive may be being seen as offline in the block on the left side of the item there you right click on to select the online option.



That would be a fast option included in Windows. Recuva wouldn't work without an active volume to begin with. When any Windows option won't work you then need an alternative option for data recovery such as a live Linux distro or other live from disk type. Note the 2009 thread for using a flash drive to make up a live data recovery disk. Using the "Other OS" For a USB Rescue Device?

The first thing however would be trying to see if you can get the drive initialized if it is showing up in the DM there. Often with removable drives and devices like flash drives or memory and memory cards SD cards on cell phones, digital cameras, etc. you need to keep a specific drive letter assigned to the drive or device to be instantly recognised each time you go to replug it in.