External Hard Disk won’t show up

My external Hard disk isn’t showing up though all my pen drives etc are.
All my connections are tight and perfect, still it isn’t showing up. I can see the led on the Hard disk switched on but it still is not working.
Please help.
Thanks in advance
Answer #1
Does it show up in disk management? (Winkey+R>Diskmgmt.msc)
Have you tried connecting it to a different USB port? How bout disconnecting your other non-essential USB devices?
Answer #2
It may sound silly but try restarting with the external plugged in… My external sometimes doesn’t show up but if i restart it with it plugged in then it does show up
Answer #3
No, it isn’t showing in disk management.
and i have restarting with the external plugged in
Also the Hard disk works fine on my laptop and other PCs
Answer #4
is the hdd formatted to the same format as the pc ???
Answer #5
How old is it? because I’ve had an enclosure fail on me before and do you have all up to date drivers and the correct ones installed?
Answer #6
I can see the led on the Hard disk switched on
it feel like it’s spinning ?
can you feel the vibrations
you tried the rear ports as well ?
might be a power problem
try connecting a flash drive
then go into device mgr and check each “USB root hub” and find which one the flash drive is plugged into and disable power mgt
then remove the flash drive and test the other drive in the same port
Answer #7
Q.1: whats the filesystem formatted to?
if your running a windows machine, it can’t see any linux filesystems
but linux can see windows.
Alternative Suggestion 1:
Have you tried downloading pmagic and checking to see if that can see the external?
while you have pmagic loaded, check the health of the disk.
it may be near the end of it’s life.
Alternative Suggestion 2:
or there may be something wrong with the connections on the inside of the housing,
the only way to test that, is to remove the harddrive from the housing and plug it into the computer like a normal hard drive.
Post as soon as you’ve tried them all
Answer #8
If the hdd is new u need to partition it !
Switch usb ports!
if your hdd is ata compatible try that!
Check to see if it looks damaged or if it smells like smoke!
Use it on another pc.
Answer #9
Is it new or does it have existing data on it ?
Tried it on another pc ? Tried a different USB cable ?
Can you feel it spinning like edwoodweb asked ?