Cant find my hard drive

[discs_r_us]

Just tried plugging my external SATA drive into my computer's USB port.
Turned it on, hard drive started to spin and windows made the little "ding" noise, installed the relevant software for the "Maxtor" USB Device etc but its not showing up in My Computer. I have 160gig worth of info on here and I cant afford to lose it.

Anyone have any suggestions?

[pepsik]

try rebooting with the drive plugged in, my raid doesn't work unless it detects the drive on boot.

[discs_r_us]

When I reboot with the drive plugged in, the computer freezes in the dos screen with the cursor flashing in the top left hand corner before it starts to load up windows.

I have to turn the external drive off and reboot again to get back into windows.

:confused::confused::confused:

[MasterMind]

Look in to Windows Device Manager for Yellow Exclamation mark. If you find any, simply remove (un-install) it. Try re-plugging your device after restart... this time in USB port at the back of cpu. HTH!

[discs_r_us]

Shows up in device manager fine m8 as USB Mass Storage Device.
Also picks up in the "Safely Remove Hardware" Window as being a Maxtor.
Im running software to scan the drive now but its gonna take 54 hours to go through it.
I'll see what happens after that.

[PhilEnfield]

Was this a factory built external drive, or an external enclosure that you put a SATA drive into ?
If the latter .... did you have special drivers?

[MasterMind]

If your external case is supplied with "Y" connecting cable try inserting both the ends of "Y" in to two separate USB ports. Usually one end of "Y" serves as Data+Power and another as extra power to the case.

Note: It's always better to read the product documentation though!

[Virgin San]

Home PC or work? Poss user restrictions?

[Zac]

or try removing the option to boot from the usb device in the bios and then reboot It looks to me like it is trying to boot from the usb drive before the internal hard drive when you start up with it plugged in.

The other thing you can check is disk management and see if it is recognised and if the partitions are showing as healthy.

[chimpuk]

From your first post, it sounds like its been detected ok

Go into computer management>disk management and see if its there, it just might not have been given a drive letter