External Hard Drive issue

First, I apologize if this is the wrong forum for this issue: the subtitle seemed pertinent, though.

Anyways - my friend has an external Western Digital hard drive. Yesterday, I was helping her get on the college network here - I was using a thumb drive. Once I was done, I went to My Computer and went to eject the F: drive, that said "Removable Drive" or something similar, figuring it was the thumb drive. I think, however, this was actually the disk drive. It didn't really eject correctly - it wouldn't come off of the list and I could no longer access it.

Now, when I start up her computer, the drive is no longer recognized at all. I figured maybe I'd just screwed up the letter allocation, but it isn't even shown in the disk management screen. I plugged the drive into my MacBook Pro and the drive pops up just fine - I can open the drive, though I can't really access anything since it's formatted for Windows, but it does seem to work.

Any ideas as to what went wrong? What I can do to get her drive to show up and be accessed again? Thanks in advance!

 

Puzzling! You say the computer won't even see the HDD as a disk drive? Even if it isn't formatted it should show up in Device Manager. Perhaps it's the USB side of things which has got confused. Check in Device Manager for any USB devices relating to the external storage. If they are there, right click and uninstall, then go to the top of Device Manager, right click and look for new hardware. Maybe this will clear the problem. If not, check the external HDD on another Windows machine.

John

 

Thanks for the tips - I'll give 'em a shot. I've tried a both of her USB ports (and her mouse works from both of them), still no luck. Tomorrow I'll give your tip a shot, though, and also see if the Windows partition on my computer will recognize it. It's certainly puzzling.

 

Hmm mine did the same thing a few days ago, but it seems to be working now.

 

Any idea what changed?

 

I have no idea... maybe restarting it? Yikes I'm not sure.

 

Actually.....I think I might have an idea. I bought a Western Digital MyBook external hard drive (which I returned due to many problems; don't buy MyBooks)

Go to device manager, and make sure it shows hidden devices.

After that, scan for hardware changes. If any yellow question marks come up, uninstall them. If it shows any entry of the hard drive there, delete it.

After that, restart the computer. Plug in the HD and see if it works.

 

I'll give it a shot - thanks!