trouble with external hard drive

i have just reinstalled windows 7 home premium 64 bit

now one of my external hard drives doesn,t work.

when i click start and click my computer it shows me the drives.

c is the internal drive j is one of my external drives and is working, but drive e is the one i cannot get to work.

the others have a bar next to them showing how much space is used and left.

all drive e shows is the letter.

in device manager the drives are working and have upto date drivers.

the drive worked fine before i reinstalled , ( which i did to clear all the crap off my pc )
it has some documents i want .

can anyone help with this problem.

thanks

Can you run diskmgmt.msc from the Run prompt in your Start menu and post a screenshot?
Sounds like your E: drive is working OK but no filesystem is recognized on it. Do you remember what you had formatted the drive as? I assume NTFS?

have included screen shot

this says disk is empty but i have files on it.

E: needs to be formatted. It doesn't have a recognisable file system.
To recover old data try first running RECUVA - a recovery program on it.

downloaded recuva. when i tell it to look at drive e the program freezes.

when i go to my computer and right click on format nothing happens.

Well there is software out there like Easeus data recovery wizard which works on RAW disks but it costs.
Formatting the disk first may reduce the chance of recovery. I note diskmanagement says the disk is empty but that could be just be because it has lost the file system.

You could try free Partition Wizard's "Partition Recovery" option (see free program list).
Hopefully someone else may come along with another suggestion.

Was the E: partition ever encrypted? (You didn't say which filesystem it was formatted with either.)

Most recovery tools won't work at all if encryption was indeed used on this partition, since they won't see any filesystem structures at all, just junk data - which would explain why Recuva froze up.

Try Test Disk TestDisk - CGSecurity and check whether it could see your drive. If it does you may attempt to recover the files. It should also be possible to repair but your first priority will be to recover before attempting to repair or fix any problems. Do go through the detailed step by step procedure given in the documentation.

i have recovered thd files using easeus data recoery wizard.

now how to format disk.

i have tried going to my computer and left click on drive e then right click and clicked format, and nothing happens. how else can i get it to format.