External hard drive appears in device manager but not in my computer

[Leland]

I have a sata hard drive and when I am connecting it to my system running windows 7 than it doesn’t appears in my computer but I see it in device manager. I don’t know what’s causing that, I haven’t used it from a long time but I don’t think there might be something wrong with the drive as it was kept untouched.

[counselor]

Have you tried using it with enclosure?? If not than arrange a enclosure and see if it gets recognized properly after that. Since you have mentioned that you can see it in device manager, I want to know which letter you see assigned to it???

[techman]

Were you using that drive with Mac or another non-windows device?? If yes then there are possibilities that it might be having incompatible format. In such cases drive is listed as Unknown or Unallocated in Disk Management. So in your case if it says Unknown than right click on Unknown and select Initialize and follow the wizard for labeling it as Unallocated. If it says unallocated than you can right click on Unallocated and select New Partition or New Simple Volume for creating a partition in it.

[Leland]

It doesn’t have any letter assigned, I have tried assigning a letter to it but it seems as I am not allowed to. I have tried right clicking on it but all option are in gray color. I don’t have an enclosure currently but ill surely arrange one and will check out if my drive works fine with it. By the way what difference it makes if I connect hard drive via enclosure or directly??? Does it really make any difference??? Is there anything else that I can try to do for getting this drive working???

[MikeY007]

If you don't have any crucial data in that drive, I will suggest you to format it completely. As your drive is not getting recognized you can use ultimatebootcd program, you can use it an erase by ZEROS. Just make sure that you are disconnecting other non required drives from your system before using this program. If that doesn’t help than your drive might be dying.

[Tanvir]

Rather than using program like ultimatebootcd, why don’t you simply delete its whole partition? Once you delete it, you might get allowed for naming it and creating a new partition. I have come across one who was facing similar issue and he had simply deleted whole partition, after that he did not had any issue in assigning and creating new partition in it. I am not sure if it might work for you or not but you can surely give it a try. If it works than format it once as NTFS before transferring anything in it, you might get an error saying “WARNING: Any data on the drive will be erased in this process. Please backup any data on the drive before proceeding.” While assigning it a letter, so don’t worry about it and simply click on ok and proceed.

[Leland]

I don’t have an enclosure currently but ill surely arrange one and will check out if my drive works fine with it. By the way what difference it makes if I connect hard drive via enclosure or directly??? Does it really make any difference???