External Hard Drive Not Showing Up

I have this external hard drive someone sent me with Data on it that I need for a project but I can't access it because it does not have a Drive Letter and it does not show up in Disk management to give it a Drive Letter.

It does show up in device manager though and says everything is fine with it. See the screenshots.

http://i730.photobucket.com/albums/ww305/h…pg?t=1238435047

http://i730.photobucket.com/albums/ww305/h…pg?t=1238435081

http://i730.photobucket.com/albums/ww305/h…pg?t=1238435102

Just some quick ideas: Do you have another computer you can try this drive on? Have you tried rebooting with the drive connected? How well was this shipped? Any possibility of physical damage? Check your Event Viewer for any coinciding errors.

I was able to activate its partition.. but it rarely shows up in the list.. and when it does show it in the list I try to assign it a Drive Letter but everytime I try it gives an error message saying that Disk management is not up to date and needs to be refreshed.. then when I refresh it is just goes into an hour glass forever… no the computer won't load up if the drive is connected while its loading up.

I would speculate your BIOS is set to boot the USB prior to your hard drive is why you cannot start with the drive installed. In other words the computer tries to boot that drive rather than the internal drive. But anyway what did you do when it did show up in Disk Management? Did you check your Event Viewer? The easiest way to determine if this is a drive problem or a computer problem is to try this drive on another computer.

"But anyway what did you do when it did show up in Disk Management?" I made it an active partition… that's all i was able to do… It showed up once in the manager right above C but it did not have any Drive Letter… but it did say it was healthy blah blah.. but it simply never shows up in the freakin manager so there's nothing I can do if it doesn't show up.

What I was wondering is what did you do differently when it did show up? Just plugging in and unplugging? Then once it just showed up but usually doesn't?

There might be errors in your Event Viewer regarding what is happening.

Event Viewer: http://www.petri.co.il/vista-event-viewer.htm

Again testing on another computer would be very telling. If it behaves the same way on two machines then that would indicate a problem with the drive itself.

Do you have power to this drive? The USB port will not provide enough power to run the drive. All that showed up was a USB device, not the drive itself. Try the drive on another machine, it could be bad. Is this a hard drive in an enclosure? If so try taking the drive out and hooking it up as a secondary drive. (is it sata, or pata?) Could even be that you do not have drivers for this hard drive. Try it on another computer first Hook it up as a secondary drive next.