Problem with My External Hard Disk

1. What operating system are you using?

2. Is the external drive formatted?

Hai,

1. Windows XP

2. unable to format, coz its not getting detected.

Try deleting and re-installing the driver - Windows/control panel/device manager....

system just shows a external drive not my device

and then what? You can't access the device or you don't like its label or....?

Try settings/control panel/administrative tools/computer management/disk management.

This should show your USB memory device,Right click to format,

After this you can give it a drive letter, then it should be recognised and show up in windows explorer.

First of all, have you recently upgraded your system? Second what type of hard drive do you have? I understand that on some WD drives the control fails, this still allows the system to 'see' the drive but allows no other actions. This leaves two possible solutions. 1. Buy another HD of the same make and size and swap the internal drives to see if you can recover your data, you would void any warranty on the drives. 2. Take the HD to a computer repair/data recovery company and see if they can recover your data. I have recently had similar problems and tried all the above to no effect, tried data recovery software but then it wouldn't identify my HD for recovery.

Two other things to check here

1. Try a different USB port if available. I have seen this issue on a laptop
2. Plug in another HDD, such as a thumb drive and see if that's showing the same non recognition.
   

hello,

if all ur tests comes to failure, try to got to the externals HDD external manufacture web (if its toshiba, seagate, etc) and install the diagnose tool. see if the tool itself can detect the HDD,.. also its recommended to try changing the computers ur using. and the tool sees the HDD then do full diagnose,.. good luck

Hai... Can you brief me the same. I m using seagate... Thanks.