My Hard Drive no longer shows up in My Computer

I have a Western Digital 1TB Hard Drive (External).
I use it 99.9% of the time on my Windows 7 64bit computer to store pictures/videos and backup important files.

It was working fine until I plugged it into a MACINTRASH to backup files from that computer.
It was a simple copy and paste from the MACINTRASH to the External HDD.

After copying the files from the MACINTRASH, I plugged it back into my PC.

My PC no longer recognizes my external HDD. I unplugged the power, plugged it back in. Same with the USB cable. Rebooted. Then my computer wouldn't reboot and windows did its automatic self repair. Nothing.

I unplugged EVERYTHING and left it that way for about 30 minutes. I plugged EVERYTHING back to my computer and turned it on.

Windows booted up fine. I plugged in the external HDD and windows had that little icon telling me it was installing drivers. I was excited to think that it finally would recognize my external HDD.

Of course, it didn't work. The HDD does not show up in my computer. It does show up in Device Manager and Disk Management.

Device Manger

• Under Disk Drives it lists it only as "WD"
• My other drives it has a nice long name like "WD 7500AAK External USB Device"
• Under properties it tells me Volume information for the disk cannot be found. (The very first time I did that prior to the reboot it said there was 0MB of space on it).
• It claims the device is working properly

Disk Management

• At first this said that I must initialize my disk.
• Now it doesn't even show up anymore.

I have no idea what to do anymore. I've had this HDD long enough that I'm sure it is no longer under warranty. I've lost so many files. Please help if you can.

This got mine back on track last night from trichard13

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/w...d-beda4bab2671

@Maccman, Can you please list out what exactly you did. It is a long thread and many solutions are suggested - some destructive leading to data loss.

If you specify the specific post that resolved your issue that may help others.

I think the Macintrash, er, Macintosh damaged the MBR and partition table on this disk. What I would do is look at this as a case requiring partition recovery (i.e. rebuilding the partition table).

Your best bet is the bootable CD version of Partition Wizard, which can be downloaded free and burned to a CD to boot from.

jumanji said:

@Maccman, Can you please list out what exactly you did. It is a long thread and many solutions are suggested - some destructive leading to data loss.

If you specify the specific post that resolved your issue that may help others.

Hello trichard13,

Thank you for visiting the Microsoft Answers Community.

Try using diskpart to assign a drive letter to Disk #0, Partition #1.
· Click Start Orb > type diskpart
· Right-click diskpart in results above > click Run as administrator
· Once diskpart loads type list volume, press enter
You should notice that you will see your partition that you use for your data, it should not show a drive letter assigned to it.
· Type select volume 6(replace 6 with the volume number assigned to the partition in question)
· Type assign letter Z (replace Z with the letter that you want to assign to it)
When you look in Computer, you should be able to see your partition.

External Hard Drives Not Showing Up

Thank you all for your replies.

I will try both suggestions when I get home and let you know if any of them worked, or if I could use more help.

Maccman said:

jumanji said:

@Maccman, Can you please list out what exactly you did. It is a long thread and many solutions are suggested - some destructive leading to data loss.

If you specify the specific post that resolved your issue that may help others.

Hello trichard13,

Thank you for visiting the Microsoft Answers Community.

Try using diskpart to assign a drive letter to Disk #0, Partition #1.
· Click Start Orb > type diskpart
· Right-click diskpart in results above > click Run as administrator
· Once diskpart loads type list volume, press enter
You should notice that you will see your partition that you use for your data, it should not show a drive letter assigned to it.
· Type select volume 6(replace 6 with the volume number assigned to the partition in question)
· Type assign letter Z (replace Z with the letter that you want to assign to it)
When you look in Computer, you should be able to see your partition.

External Hard Drives Not Showing Up

My hard drive doesn't show up in that list.
After my computer boots up the hard drive isn't spinning, but the light is on.

It's not spinning? Then something is sending the harddrive to sleep, apparently.

You could simply turn it off and back on to get it to spin up again - then see if it's picked up by the system or by the diskpart commands.

Corazon said:

It's not spinning? Then something is sending the harddrive to sleep, apparently.

You could simply turn it off and back on to get it to spin up again - then see if it's picked up by the system or by the diskpart commands.

Nope

Does your Mac use HFS+? Windows is NTFS or FAT. Writing to a NTFS disk with a Mac will destroy the file system unless you're using a plug-in on the Mac or writing to separate partitions. And I think you have to partition the drive on the Mac first, then Windows skipping the Mac partition area.