Windows 7: Windows 7 does not recognize my external HDD

Installing the chipset drivers won't hurt. Like Night Hawk has suggested, the drivers could be corrupted, or just need updating.

If installing the chipset drivers don't resolve the issue, we can at least cross that off the list of troubleshoots.

Hm, well I'll be damned. I installed the chipset drivers, restarted, and the HDD was recognized on boot up. No need to eject/plug back in.

I'm hoping it's not a lucky launch or anything, but I will report back here in a few days whether it worked, and definitely if it didn't.

Know anyone with a live ubuntu cd? That's one way to see onto the drive when Windows is unable to provided the drive and data cable are good. Make sure it's plugged in all the way at the drive end as well as into any usb port.

There are several partition recovery programs other then the DrFreebie nightmare but do cost an average of $70 for rescue if the factory partition's own MFT is pooched. Another suggestion of course would be seeing if the drive works on another laptop or desktop if you brought it to a friend or repair shop for a quick look without being charged.

Awesome!

Well it's a good start. Please keep us updated on the outcome.

*sigh* Well this morning I booted up my laptop and am still having the old problem. The HDD will not be recognized.

Is it showing up in the Disk Management tool? If you find it there but not in any explorer window you can still add it in as a new drive by right clicking on the drive item there to select the change drive letter option.

The long term solution for it if no hardware or cable problems are found of course would be nuking the factory problem partition off completely once you have everything on it backed up and creating a brand new NTFS volume to work with since the present one(factory Fat 32) seems to be having too many problems to start with.

If the drive is on the way out you would also want to get everything off as well just in case. Either way at least you will have all that preserved.

When the drive isn't registering in Windows, this is what I see when I right click on it:


And also, I wouldn't have any way to move all the stuff, because I keep all my games, movies, and my lappy backup on it because my lappy's internal hard drive has only 20 GB free of space...

From the looks of that the drive's partition table was corrupted now resulting in seeing unallocated drive space rather then an existing partition. In other words partition recovery time is what you would now need in order to locate and recover files from an apparently non existant partition.

Just hope you won't need the Dr.FreeNightmare to recover them better known as the free Fedora based Dr.Freeware data recovery program that literall renames everything it recovers from a drive into ??? many folders with names like recover_1, recover_2, etc. I pointed out to someone else lately with a similar problem.

This is another reason why custom installing programs to secondary drives leads to disasters! If you are not able to recovery anything from the drive you will need to reinstall all programs as well as suffer the loss of all the files you were storing on it. Not good!

The price tags on most softwares that can recover entire partitions when the MFT is broken typically run at about $70 as well when shopping around to price them. The demo versions won't work! A good number were tried out recently on an older machine when the partition table was lost and the drive appeared empty just as you now see that one.

Alright, well just updating: the drive totally died a few days ago, and I sent it in for RMA, when I get it back I will be replacing the RMA'd drive with my laptop's internal drive.

If you want to help me with that please go to this thread.

Hope the new drive is reliable as it should. The one thing about external enclosures I looked at when picking one out was cooling since the factory ones that come with drives included often lack good air flow where drives can get quite warm. For long term use that is something to consider as well.