Hard drive recognized; not in "My Computer"?

A while a go I bought a 250gb Western Digital hard drive from woot.com. I was expecting this thing to give out within a few days, have half dead sectors or something; but after plugging it in to a nice new external enclosure, it worked fine. It was sitting on my desk for a while, collecting dust, when I decided to put it in my server machine to store all of my mp3s, etc which I share accross my network.

I put it into my main computer and cleaned it off completely. Then I made a 232gb Fat32 partition (what? aren't those limited? I don't get it either) and put it back in the external enclosure.

My comp recognized it, so I reformatted it to NTFS using Windows and copied all of my junk onto it.

As it's doing this, it's just sitting on my desk with half of the opened external enclosure which is running it into the comp. This hard drive gets EXTREMELY hot. I had it sitting on top of a plastic screwdriver for ventilation, and the plastic started to melt slightly.

So, I put it into my server computer. I had some 3 1/2" to 5 1/4" converters around, so I put it in the 5 1/4" slot so that it would have more ventilation. Additionally, I took the fans off of 2 CPU coolers and taped them onto the front of the case, blowing inwards. The air goes accross the 250gb HD and is sucked out of the back by the PSU fan. It stays at a comfortable 78 degrees Fahrenheit now.

I booted the server machine. Bios recognized the HD, good. Booted into Windows Server 2003. But when I started up My Computer, I was suprised to find my new drive absent.

I figured that Windows was just not recognizing the drive, so I went into device manager. But the drive is in device manager. What? Maybe it isn't partitioned?

I downloaded a program called Paragon Partition Manager. The program is annoying; took me a while to find a way to simply view all of the parts on a drive. But, it did show the 250gb drive as being parted and formatted with NTFS. It even gave me the used/free space.

Yet, the drive still isn't recognized in My Computer. Weird problem. What's going on?

It seems as if the drive is physically working - Windows is just not mounting it.

Specs on the hard drive: http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=WD2500LB-R

Specs on the comp w/ hard drive:



Device Manager: http://img191.imageshack.us/my.php?image=devmngr6te.png

Thanks in advance, sorry for the long post.

Right click My Computer and select Manage
Click on disk management

Is the drive listed there and if so does it have a drive letter?

Drives without drive letters will not show up in My Computer.

The drive is listed, but without a drive letter.

Wow! Reply within 6 minutes.

//edit: Messed around, found out how to mount it to D: and it works!

But why didn't Windows mount it automatically? Will I need to remount the drive manually every time I restart Windows?

Right click the drive and select Change Drive Letter and Path

Give the drive a letter and you are all set

You might want to partition that in to 3 partitions, each under 130gigs. If it's working great, but that'll help you if one of the partitions decides to go on vacation with all of your files.

Hey .. basically i went to My Computer , Manager - and i was in Computer Management - (before i continue i have a maxtor 80gb firewire external hardrive)
I then went to disk management and i partitioned the drive and mounted it but every time i tried formatting it, it said windows could not format - i think i un partitioned it and un done everything and now when i plug my external hardrive its loads up at the bottom of the taskbar - safely remove hardware - but its not in my computer and its not even in computer management anymore !

Please help ... reply here or email me djcobra@asianmix.net

Thank You

Create a new topic with your issue and you'll probably get better response than you will tagging other people's posts.

I had the same problem. I had to right click my computer, select manage, click on disk management, then i saw my drive in there, but without a letter. then i had to right click not on the partion section (to the right) but on the drive secition (to the left), and select "initialize drive". Then, and only then, could I assign the drive a letter by right clicking on the drive section and choosing "New Partition..."

Thanks guys.

I've been able to follow all the steps up until this one (see above).

I just got my Western Digital hard drive for work a week ago. I used it on my work MAC first and now that I'm trying to pull up my files at home on my Windows XP, I'm having trouble. I have located the HD in my Disk Management. There is no Drive Path and no File name. I've tried to right click and format or change drive letters and path, but I can't select anything but "help". Everything else is grey and cannot be selected. Please help!

I don't think you can view files created on a Mac with Windows XP because of the way Mac formats the drive. I'll have to do some research on how to get this to work.

Here is what you are going to have to do and only do this if there is nothing on the drive you want to keep.

1. Connect your external hard drive to your mac
2. Open Disk Utility (command+F and type 'disk utility')
3. Click the drive you want to format in the left hand pannel
4. Click the 'partition' tab
5. Select under Volume Scheme '1 partition'
6. Under Volume Information, under format select 'MS- DOS (FAT)'
7. Click 'Apply'

Once you complete this, Windows XP should be able to see the drive and assign a drive letter to it.

Thank you for looking into this...but I absolutely have to keep the files on my hard drive. Is there no way to use my hard drive on both the mac and the xp? They're video files mostly put together on Final Cut Pro...

In order to do so you would have to format the drive as FAT32 and not whatever Mac uses which is HFS I believe. There may be a software solution you could install on Windows but I am not sure about that.

Put the contents of the drive in a MAC (since MAC can read the drive), format the hard drive (this would remove all the contents on the drive... I think what grinch said there is what you want) and then MAC should still be able to read the drive and then you can put those files back on the drive.

I read the help post for being unable to view files on a 2nd hard drive in an old computer I have, below:

Right click My Computer and select Manage
Click on disk management
Is the drive listed there and if so does it have a drive letter?
Drives without drive letters will not show up in My Computer

The drive is not listed, what next? Thank you for any help from a n00b