Windows 7: 2 matching ext. drives but only one shows at a time

I have 2 WD external 1TB usb hard drives that are exactly the same. I have had them both plugged in at the same time in the past just fine and both shows up. Now when I plug them in only one will show at a time... whichever one is plugged in first is the one that shows. The other makes the connection sound but will not show up in windows explorer. (I can plug in other makes of external drives and they show fine.) I have tried manually changing the drive letters. However it just labels each one the same drive letter when I replug them back in. I have tried renaming the drives... making sure they are not labeled the same. Still does not work. Its like it thinks they are both the exact same drive. Any other ideas would be greatly appreciated.



Thanks!
Nancy

That's kind of weird, but try going to the disk manager and see if they both show up there. If one is labeled as "Forien Disk" right click and import forien disk and that may add it (and a drive letter for it).

Well it didn't show it as foreign but when I scrolled down far enough it showed the drive listed as Offline... said it was conflicting or something with another drive. I clicked it to bring it online and there it is! I have been in disk management ALL morning and never scrolled down far enough to see it way down on the list.

Thanks for that info that led me in the right direction!
Nancy

NP. That is really weird though, first time I heard of that happening!

It's possible Windows assigned them the same drive letter, so only one will show up at a time. Bringing it back "online" probably re-assigned it a different letter so it's no longer conflicting.

It seems like the only way that would hapen is if both drives had the same internal id. Or had been assigned the same ID by this or another windows install, which is hard to imagine actually. Sort of like, imagine if you had two computers on the network with the same MAC addresss...

Right. It couldn't, or shouldn't happen on the same system and would be more likely if one Windows system assigned one drive a letter, and a different system assigned the same letter to the other drive.