Portable Hard Drive won't open?

Kyouya's G

I'm not a computer genius so if anyone has anything to help please tell me how to get there and what to do in step by step or else I might get lost.

My portable hard drive won't work. It usually auto runs when I plug it in then I view it as a folder, or sometimes, I go to My computer and it's there as another local disk.

Neither of these things are happening and I don't know why. It shows up the on my taskbar just as being able to be safely removed and I checked it's properties in the device manager and it says it's running fine.

I even tried to uninstall the driver but that didn't work.

Any ideas?
How do you get to drive management?

It is already installed and working properly says Windows.

There are no viruses....
Also, about the virus....HOW can I explore when I just said I can't access it?

I really hate when people answer without reading the whole question.
***********I FIXED MY OWN PROBLEM***********

I'm going to put what I did for future help for others. READ STEPS BEFORE TAKING THEM, DOWNLOADS ARE NECESSARY FOR MY FIX.

1. Go to Start < Run < type "compmgmt.msc" NO ""
2. In the Computer Management window select Disk Management under Storage in the left panel.
3. Find your device. I didn't notice it at first because mine was labeled "Disk 1" Tip: Unplug your portable then plug it in because the window will update immediately, that's how to find the right one.
4. See if the disk is assigned a drive letter. If you're having my problem it won't have one. If you do you can try skipping some of the next steps, but I'm not sure it'll work for any other problem.
5. Right click the disk. Tip: Don't click the box where it says Disk #, click the wider box to the right with the info in it.

*continuing in another edit*
6. Create a partition and follow the steps. Now you're device will be recognized and show up in the My Computer folder again under whatever drive letter you assigned.

7. Now if you try to click the drive in My Computer it's going to ask you to format. Formating erases everything and I was not able to find a way to get the files without erasing BUT, I found a way to get them after erasing. So if you read through everything then format the drive.

8. Here's why I said to read through, to get through this step you need to download a program. Either legally or illegally, whatever you want to do. If you download and need a key, email me, just put it in the subject or I might delete. The program you need is. Recover My Files. I stand by this and it supposedly works for recovering files from other places even ones never saved. It recovered everything even stuff I had long since deleted on my portable hard drive.

*continuing*
9. After you download the program it won't ask you for a key until you need to save your files. Scan for what you're looking for, but don't do a quick scan. You'll have to select all the file types you want to find. This is good if you are only looking for one specific or a few specific things. I needed to restore mostly my movies/anime. This will take AWHILE depending on what you want and how many files were once where you're looking. Make sure you have stable power because I got all the way to the end of a 3 hour search and my comp turned off.
10. After the search you'll have to go through the list to find what you want, I suggest searching by name, file size or type.

After that just save the files (I put them on the desktop so they wouldn't mix up with my other files) and you're done! Worked like a charm. Hopefully it works for everyone else.

Answer
Do you see it in Drive Management? If so if has lost the partition information that describes how the data is laid out on the disk. If you can see the drive there don't do anything with it and take it to someone knowledgeable straight away. It may be possible to recover the data from the drive but if you do the wrong thing it will be lost forever.

My portable hard drive won't show up! Any help here?

Rhett

Well I had this 500GB Portable Hard Drive that I held a lot of my documents and stuff on, and I decided to protect it I would get a password on it. I look up how I could do such a thing and I found this one program I thought would do the trick. So I installed it to my portable hard drive and everything and then I start it up to realize that I needed administrator permission to use it.

The problem with that is the laptop I use for school a) uses 7, which brings up that whole issue and b) it's not my laptop. It belongs to the school and they let me use it for my school stuff. The problem sets in with the fact that the account I use for it has no administrator privileges, so it won't work like I need to. So I proceed to remove the program from my portable hard drive.

Once I did that, I exited it out, unplugged it, then plugged it back in to let the changes on it set in. That's when the issue came up.

Any help here?

Answer
Well I use Windows. If you go to "My Computer" on your Windows computer, you might see your portable hard drive device. By the way if you use a 500 GB Sandisk U3 Hard Drive device they have a built-in password option. Believe me, I already have a password on mine. Hopefully this works!

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