I have an external hard drive and I have it connected to my computer via usb, but nothing shows up in the "My Computer" screen, and I've been through disk management and stuff, but there's no sign of it there either. My computer acknowledges that there's something plugged in though, since it makes the USB noise, and there's a "Safely Remove Hardware" icon. But other than that, there's nothing. I can't use it, please help!
P.S. It's some no name brand cheapo harddrive off of buy.com. There's no phone support number or nothing. Not even a brand name, as far as I know. It just seems like some generic hard drive enclosure around a generic harddrive. I guess it serves me right for not going for the established brands.
XP Home will probably identify most all USB External Hard Drives, but you may have to "assign" a Drive Letter.
GoTo: Start - Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Storage - Disk Management
Find and "highlight" by clicking once with your cursor - the drive that is "unknown" or "unidentified" etc
In the command line - Actions - select to Assign or Change Drive Letter Assignment
I've tried that before and I think that's the problem I've been having. Nothing unknown is showing up in my "Disk Management" dillyo. It shows my hard drive and cd drives, but that's it, no unknown drives. The only thing "unknown" thing that's showing up is a partition of my harddrive, and I don't think I want to delete that.
The only thing "unknown" thing that's showing up is a partition of my harddrive
What exactly is the designation of this item?
Unformated Hard Drives do appear as "partition" <— this could be your External HD.
Give it a Drive letter, somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, like M:\
If it is not formatted, then it is most likely your External Hard Drive.
If it does not presently have a Drive letter associated with it, then it is not being used by your Operating System currently and does not show up in your My Computer Windows Explorer file structure Tree.
After you give it a Drive Letter, it will show up in Windows Explorer, but probably as unformated.
I tried that, but changing the drive letter of that partition isn't even allowed.
I'm attaching a screenshot.
Thanks so much for all your efforts so far, I really appreciate it.
