How do i use the recovery when the hard drive doesn't show up in it? its an external hard drive..
You can try enter the drive letter when using the Recovery console to enter the CHKDSK command.
If the drive letter is known to you. The link also shows how to perform the CHKDSK procedure in
recovery console.
Further USB troubleshooting procedures:
You should also try disconnect all USB periphals, reboot the machine. Connect the periphals once
again, while booted, connect the external drive last and see if the drive turns up. It might be a
matter of a wrongly allocated IRQ number, which is why I always allocate a drive letter further down
the alphabet. My external drive is Q for example.
Right-click the "My computer" icon, choose Manage.
Click disk-management. Once snapped into disk-management, choose action in the upper menu, choose rescan disks.
Double-click disc-management and see if it turns up.
If the above doesn't work, stay in the manage menu, but this time click on device manager.
Choose "show" in the upper menu, and select "show hidden devices".
If it turns up there, right-click and choose update / update driver (Can't remember the exact wording in Vista)
Check if it brings back the drive.
If the USB controllers somehow have gone haywire, do the following;
Open your control panel, and then choose system.
Hardware and then Device manager.
Scroll down to your USB controllers and remove one by one.
Reboot. Once rebooted Vista will install the controllers once again. Any corruption of the controllers will be
rectified during this procedure.
Note: If you are in the manage menu, you can choose device manager from there.
Regards