External hard drive device manager says is working properly but doesn't show to open. how do I open?

[GunFighter]

I have a problem with my WD external hard drive( media player powered by samsung) when connected to my lap top by usb doesn't show up im "my computer". I've tried swapping USB caples, power cables and still nothing. when I plug in the USB cable I can "hear" the noise of WinXP finding hardware, But nothing shows up in My Computer. I've restarted the computer and tried plugging the drive into every USB port that I have, but none of this has worked. External hard drive device manager says is working properly but doesn't show to open. how do I open?

[Sachit]

I kept trying to force the computer to try to recognize the drive while booting up. Check the control panel in system- device manager- Ubs devices to see if you recognize the external device you attached. its ok, then probably the file system that you have formatted the external HD is not recognized by the pc (laptop) so format again using Fat or fat32. External cases have circuit boards and they can die. Have you tried plugging it into another PC?

[Myron]

Did you format the Hard disk on a Mac? using what file system? it may Likely a Drive letter collision. Best to use DiskMgmt.Msc to assign the external drives a mid-alphabet driver letter. Windows tries to be neat and orderly by assigning drives the Next ( available ) letter.

[Zane]

After several experiments with different configurations I have concluded my motherboard was auto configuring the external and internal 500 drives as drive 0. Don't know how many have you used this but try out the Diskmgmt.msc
control utility.
Goto Start > Run and type diskmgmt.msc and press Run.
You will see a correctly populated virtual representation of our hard disk partitions.