Windows 7 cannot find external hard drive

I recently had to reset my laptop to factory settings in order to reload windows 7 that came with my HP Pavillion notebook. Before doing so I followed microsoft instructions to backup my data onto an external hard drive. 45 GB data was backed up. After everything was reset, I went to backup and restore at the start menu. Then I selected: backup to restore files from. Browse network locations. Windows cannot find the external hard drive. If I type in G:\ I can see the back up file and if I select it, the OK button is not active. I don't know what I am doing wrong. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Welcome to the forum if you go in to disk manager does the drive show with a drive letter it may need to have a drive letter assigned

Open Explorer. Can you see the drive? If not, open disk manager, expand the columns so we can read them, with the sniping tool take a snapshot an then post the image as an attachment.

Sorry but I cannot find a disk manager. I searched the term and nothing came up.
Attached is a snipe of where the back up data are located on the G drive.

thanks

Attached is disk management screen shot.

Sorry, please use this screen shot Capture2. It has the external hard drive

As an external HDD it should have been formatted as NTFS.
Lets do a check disk to see if it's ok and fix any problems.
Open a CMD window and type chkdsk g: /f

Back to the backup program, the files aren't on the network. It says to hit Refresh so the program will look at local drives.

Attached is copy of CMD window after typing: chkdsk g: /f

Also went back to backup and restore and hit Refresh button and still does not see local drives.

Thanks

Your disk is ok.
Try to open Explorer, go to the G: drive, find the backup file and double click on it.