External hard drive not communicating

[onassis]

I have a lacie external hard drive. When I connect the USB cable it shows up on my taskbar but I cant access it anywhere. I recently removed a virus off my computer and everythig works fine but my external hard drive.

 

[Rik]

How old is the drive and how much use has it had?

 

[bushwhacker]

I have a lacie external hard drive. When I connect the USB cable it shows up on my taskbar but I cant access it anywhere. I recently removed a virus off my computer and everythig works fine but my external hard drive.

You should open up the Disk Management to check if it is healthy or not.

 

[onassis]

its not showing up in disk management at all. It doesnt show up anywhere. I'm beginning to think its done for.

 

[onassis]

I've only had it for 5 months

 

[nork]

I think the box may be ok but not the h drive.
Take the hard drive out of the external box. Whatever mfgr it is, go to their website and download the diagnostic software and put it on a floppy. Also have a win98 boot disk handy or get one or make one. Then, presuming its an ide drive, slave the hard drive from your external box to your primary or secondary ide cable on your pc. Or,unhook all hard drives on your pc and set this hard drive to primary\master and install it as such.
Put win98 boot disk in floppy and boot. You may have to go into bios and enable or set floppy to be your first boot device. Once you get to dos then take out win98 boot disk and insert mfgr diagnostic floppy. They differ in how they say it, but look for a setting something like "write zeroes to your hard drive". Do that. What is does is erase any and all virus, malware, trojan from not only your master boot record but the rest of the h drive as well. And, it returns the drive back to factory settings. If that goes fine then you can use either the diagnostic floppy or your win98 boot disk to format the drive. You can even format it as fat32 using win98 because when you put it back in the external box and you see the drive in win xp then you can go to computer management and format the hard drive as NTFS if you want.
There are other ways to do this but i like to use this method as it does what i mentioned above, especially giving the h drive a new master boot record, so important in having a good hard drive and a good system.