Windows 7: External hard drive not showing up

I gather some people like large FAT32 partitions when wanting to interface to other hardware (eg. some gaming consoles).



My understanding is that the FAT32 standard (and Windows7) will recognize 2TB FAT32 partitions but deliberately (for some reason??) limits it's internal format capabilities. You just use a third party format utility (eg. Partition Wizard). A big downside is that the FAT32 standard limits your individual files to 4 GB.

Sorry for posting in this old topic, but have to express thanks for all the excellent knowledge to be found on this forum (just spend a little time searching).

Problem like the OP, in one of my laptops, an external usb HD did not show up (but was listed in Devices & Printers...). Then found this:

Fixed! (just the remaining question as to why it was not automatically assigned a letter, like it used to).

Anyway, thanks a lot.

Just a follow-up, fixed permanently by doing this in cmd:

diskpart
automount enable

Why automount ever got disabled? no idea.