Windows 7 - Laptop will not recognize USB Hard Drive

I have a Dell D430. I want to back up some files to a hard drive I have in an enclosure that hooks up by USB, My laptop does not see it in my computer. Ii have tried restarting and that does not help. What can I do to get it to recognize it?
Thanks, Bill

Have a look in Disk Management and check whether it has a drive letter and is initialized and formatted.

How do I do that?

Start > right click on Computer in the right pane > Manage > Disk Management. Tell me what it says about your drive.

What does all this mean?

Whats on that hard drive and where did it come from ?

Well, for one they have no drive letter - so you cannot see them. Assign a drive letter to the 37GB partition. Then, what is this mini partition of 55MB, where did that come from?

It is a hard drive I had cloned an image of another hard drive on using Acronis. Sold that computer. I went into disk managment as you see, then formatted the larger portion after the sytem assined it as D: They was some kind of conflict I had to address. I don't know what the small partition is, but it would not let me format it if I remember correctly, and I did a Windows Easy tranfer of Files and settings to the D partition. I am reinstalling Windows 7 Pro clean on this computer, and that's what I was using this USB hard drive for. Got it done correctly I think. Never have ran into this "not recgognizing problem. I guess it's a Windows 7 thing huh?

I don't think we can blame it on Windows7. Something is all screwed up. I do not quite undestand the cloning part. Are you saying that you cloned a Windows 7 image to that drive? The small partition could be an image of the a system assigned partition from where you cloned the whole thing. Then you say that you transfered files. You need to unravel that whole story because I do not see the sequence of events.

I'll try to explain. I had used the USB hard drive as a cloned back up for another computer that I sold. I no longer need the clone. I decided to use this hard drive as an external drive to transfer my files and settings from this computer to it so I can do a clean install on this one, then put the files and settings back on here. I formatted the USB drive, then transferred my files and settings from this computer to it using Windows easy tranfer. I tranferred to the newly formatted D: partional on the USB. I do not know what the small partition is. Does this make better sense?

My original problem was that this computer would not recognize the USB hard drive initially. When I was told to go to disk management, I figured out how to assign it a letter and format it, therefore, problem is solved, unless you see something I missed.


Comments please?