Help with external hard drive problem

L

liquidsoap89

New Member
Okay so I've had this external hard drive for like 2 or 3 years now and I've never had a problem with it. But I recently reformatted my computer and now when I turn on this hard drive it is detected by windows and it installed its driver or whatever it does, but there is no drive I can access in the my computer folder.

I checked the device manager and it's listed there, and my other external hard drive works just fine (in fact I'm using it right now).

I read somewhere that you can only have 4 ide drives or something per computer and I have 2 dvd drives, 1 internal hard drive and 2 external hard drives, so my thought was that 1 of the 2 external drives counts towards those 4 and the other one can't or something, I know the hard drive still works because I was using it before I reformatted my computer, and I didn't do anything to it after. But I do know that I plugged in my external hard drive that works BEFORE I plugged in the one that doesn't work (after I reformatted), so the 4 ide drives thing does make sense.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Have you tried the hard drive on another computer?Try right clicking on my computer, and hitting manage. Go to Storage->Disk management. Is the drive listed there? If it is, see if it has a drive letter, you may need to right click on the drive and hit "assign drive letter", or you may just need to reformat the drive...
 
Ohhhh my I fail. I went to storage -> disk management like you said. And I see that the drive is unallocated. Instantly I am reminded of when I reformatted my computer and forgot that my portable drive was left on; and of course, I delete the partition on that drive.

Well, problem solved, but now if I want to partition this drive again with windows partition wizard do I choose primary partition or extended partition, cuz I don't want this to steal the thunder from my main drive or anything like that :)

Thank you SO MUCH as well!!!

EDIT: I'm doing a primary partition, seems logical, hope all goes well and I can go back to having a backup drive.... man I feel so dumb right now. :(
 
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