Ext HD Installs But Cant See It.

Hi, I have a 2007{?} TOSHIBA Satellite L45 PSL48U-013005 adn it has 2.0 USB ports. I have and older Western digital HD that when I connected to my PC laptop window opened and said installing driver software.

It finished and I have icon that shows when clic on the ^ arrow on right side of my taskbar and if I click on the icon it asks eject ext HD safely.

Problem is, if I open explorer, the WD HD is not shown under computer. It does show in divices and printers but from there I can only view some of its properties or eject it.

So strange it installed software, but no can see or open HD in explorer i.e. I cant really see anything on HD or format it or do anything with it.

Thx for any ideas, but I'm think this WD HD is to old?

rsix

External HDDs sometimes need to be Partitioned followed by Formatting, usually done in Disk Management. Right-click Computer/My Computer/This PC and choose Manage then look in the Disk Management section. After an HDD is formatted a drive letter has to be assigned or the drive will not show in Windows Explorer/File Explorer.

With only your problem external HDD connected, post a screenshot of Windows Disk Management.

Thanks to Berton and Jumanji. I did not know or remmmeber there exists a disk managment program/app. I'm attaching screen shot of the disk management. I believe the first on is the Ext. HD and it has no name altho it says only 1.46 GB and I think this Ext HD is 300 or 500 GB. Cant recall exactly.

the 2nd and 3rd are my internal HD partitioned.

So maybe from disk managment I can access the ext HD to format it but I dont yet see that ability.

Oh wait now I see it must be disk 1 on left side lower and it is 232GB or if I chagen to list view it appears above also now.

I see I can right click on disk 1 make it dyamic disk from disk management but I dont know if that is going to get me formatting it. I dont understand why I cannot see this Ext Disk 1 in explorer-folder window on side bar under computer as is the two partitions internal HD.

jumanji said:

With only your problem external HDD connected, post a screenshot of Windows Disk Management.

What I see is Disk 0 is you bootable/system drive, leave it alone. Disk 1 appears to be partitioned but since nothing is mentioned about whether each partition is NTFS or FAT32, they are not yet Formatted. Format the 2 largest partitions then you can assign a drive letter. I wouldn't worry about the smaller partitions. Or you could simply delete ALL the partitions and create one full-size or split the drive as desired.

There's commands available when right-clicking on a drive or partition. If a partition is formatted it should show as what format it is. If it's RAW there is a problem but usually should be NTFS or FAT32 if the drive is working properly. I have seen a partition formatted as EXT3 but it was unusable.

Bert, thx, however, there is no format option in any menu in disk manager, there is no format option anywhere when I right click on anything that is disk 1 in disk manager or devices etc...

I'm thinking now, that the last time I used this it was with mac, so, even tho I should be able to format with my PC, maybe if delete all files and format with the mac it will then appear on PC as it should with icon and right click to a format option.

Thx again for your attempts to help and advise.

rsix

Berton said:

There's commands available when right-clicking on a drive or partition. If a partition is formatted it should show as what format it is. If it's RAW there is a problem but usually should be NTFS or FAT32 if the drive is working properly. I have seen a partition formatted as EXT3 but it was unusable.

DON'T reformat on a Mac if going to use it on a Windows computer, Windows can't read Mac HFS+ formatting.
HFS Plus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Some later versions of Mac OS X can read NTFS but not write, haven't found suitable third-party software yet that works good. I use a Mac and Linux computers with my NAS/Network Attached Storage drive plugged into my Router.

In a case like yours I'd download GPARTED, create the bootable CD, boot to it with the drive attached and delete the partitions to get a clean drive then create suitable partitions on it, every drive needs at least one.

Thx, bert but that sounds a more complicated than I want to get into. rsix

Berton said:

DON'T reformat on a Mac if going to use it on a Windows computer, Windows can't read Mac HFS+ formatting.
HFS Plus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Some later versions of Mac OS X can read NTFS but not write, haven't found suitable third-party software yet that works good. I use a Mac and Linux computers with my NAS/Network Attached Storage drive plugged into my Router.

In a case like yours I'd download GPARTED, create the bootable CD, boot to it with the drive attached and delete the partitions to get a clean drive then create suitable partitions on it, every drive needs at least one.