external hdd problem

Recently my 160 gig western digital hard drive is not showing up under "my computer" i tried resetting the drive, disconnecting cables and nothing helps. Any ideas on what could be happening? Its driving me nuts, i have a ton of movies/tv shows on there.

Open Disk Management.

Right click My Computer > Manage > Disk Management

Does it show up in Disk Management? Does it have the same drive letter as a mapped network drive?

No it doesnt show up. It doesnt show up on either of my computers.

That's not so good. Does the drive have power? Can you feel it start to spin and operate when it's plugged in to the power? If you put your hand or ear on it as it's plugged in, you'll feel a gentle vibration if it's spinning.

yeah, it powers up and i can hear the disc spin. The computer makes the little ding noise when i plug the USB cable in but it just doesnt show up

It also does show up in the device manager, i just cant access the files....

Is there anything unusual in Disk Management that could be your external disk? If Windows recognises it enough to be in Device Manager, it should show up in Disk Management in some form too.

alright so i went into
device manager>hard discs>external HDD>

than when i click on properties>volumes

nothing can be displayed. It cant tell me any of the info about size/space or anything.

But something does appear in Disk Management relating to your external drive.

Can you post a screenshot of Disk Management here?

it doesnt appear in the disc management. only in the device managers. But it wont show up anywhere else and if i try to see anything else it doesnt show up. ill try to post a screen shot tomorrow.

Have you tried using a different USB port? Same thing happened to me a few times on different pc's and using a different USB port fixed the problem. I haven't had time to figure it out completely but I suspect it has something to do with an IRQ conflict.

Unplug all un-needed USB devices then boot up and try the external HDD in different USB ports - one of them might work.

ive tried it on atleast 6-7 different USB ports across 3 computers. It gets recognized (the ding when plugged in) but it doesnt show up.

I know what might fix this. I had this happen on an external HDD because of a drive letter conflict. I was annoyed but I had already backed it up so I just formatted it.

PM me for details.