External hard drive doesn't appear in Computer

Posted by Thomas Clayson on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Thomas Clayson
Published on 2011-09-16T23:35:14Z Indexed on 2012/08/30 3:41 UTC
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Filed under:

windows-7

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hard-drive

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external-hard-drive

I cannot work out why this is happening. I have an external hard drive (which is an old laptop hard drive with an IDE to USB adapter). Plugging it into my computer powers it up. It spins correctly and the lights on the adapter flash normally.

Uninstalling from hardware manager and plugging it back in causes Windows to "install new software", and it says it has installed properly.

In Disk Management it comes up in the bottom part as Disk 2 with the right size (~60 GB), but not in the top half. There are three empty drives in the top half. They don't have titles or drive letters. Right clicking them bring up slightly varying context menus, but all with the options disabled. Here is a picture of my Disk Management screen:

Screen shot of Disk Management

How do I make this drive show up in My Computer? I need to format it and use it as an external hard drive.

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