# [SOLVED] external hard drive detected but not showing up



## Squeezit

I contacted microsoft support, they told me to contact support for this (crappy) computer that I just bought.

The computer is only temporary, I'm returning it when I receive mine back from repair. However I need the computer for my job. With my job I have some important files stored to an external harddrive that I need for work (as well as all my music  )

Well when I plug in the external HDD, it shows up under Device Manager, it also shows up under device and printers. Even displays the name Maxtor 3200.
I have some documents I need for work that I need to access on that drive, but it doesn't show up under "computer". My usb flash drive does show up, as well as my other external harddrive that I'm borrowing. 

Kinda hoping to get this fixed before I go into work today, so any help is appreciated. It's an old harddrive but I'm pretty certain it's still working as I just used it a couple days ago no problem before my laptop died. It's possible it just "happened to die" in the past 2 days when I switched computers, but I find that unlikely, and I'm crossing my fingers that that is not the case.


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## Rich-M

*Re: external hard drive detected but not showing up*

Go "run,diskmgmt.msc, and hit "enter" and tell us if it shows in disk manager and how it shows.


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## Squeezit

Thanks for the fast response!
Here's a picture of what I got with that. I outlined in red what I think might be it. 
The rest looks to be partitions of the internal hdd.










On second thought, I think this is the one I'm looking at, it's about a 150GB harddrive (approximately)
I didn't realize I could scroll down on that part, sorry.









sorry for the double post, here's what I get if I try and change the drives Letter:


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## Rich-M

*Re: external hard drive detected but not showing up*

That suggests the drive is corrupted. I would try it on another pc to see if it is still working normally elsewhere. You could always take the drive out of the enclosure and plug it into a sata port on another desktop and be most likely able to recover the files on it though. Failure on external drives is normally the chipset on the box itself and not the internal drive inside that's shot.


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## Squeezit

ah thanks for that. I'll try it out on my roommates computer whenever he wakes up and get back to you if that works.
I want to leave it as an external for now, because when i get my laptop back I'll need to get those files one more time. But if I must I suppose I can always buy a new external hdd and move the files from my external, to the computer, then to the new external.

So my roommate is lazy and hasn't been willing to get his laptop out for me, even though I have some pretty important files I need.
So I was messing around with it, I created a shortcut to my desktop for maxtor 3200, but that only opens device settings, it won't let me explore the drive that way.

So I was wondering, I see in diskmgmt that I can convert to dynamic, I guess it's a basic drive currently.

If I did that, would that possibly help? And would it delete all my data currently stored on it?


----update-----

So I was just playing around with anything and everything.
I opened device manager and uninstalled my hdd, then I plugged it back and and let it reinstall.
Finally I have access to it!

On that note, whenever I visited device manager before it said the device was working properly so I didn't really want to mess with anything I was unsure, but I'm glad it's finally working


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