My external hard drive does not show up in "My Computer"

[Yaya1987]

I have recently re-installed Windows XP which consequently reformat my hard disk. When I plug in my external hard disk USB (which was working fine prior formatting the PC), it does not shows up in 'My Computer'.

When checking Device Manager, the device is working properly. I have verified on Disk Management, the external hard disk is there but with no Drive letters and paths, it mention "unallocated". It does not allow me to give it a drive letter.

During the re-installation on Windows, the external HD was connected to My PC.

The external HD is an Apollo 2.5" portable hard drive 250GB.

On the "USB device properties", under volume tab, the partition style is: Master Boot Record, capacity:238,473 MB, Unallocated space: 238,473 MB, Reserved space: 0 MB and status: Online

Can anyone help me on the above issue. I have some important data on it. Has the disk been erased?

 

[mailpup]

Did you install all of your motherboard drivers, chipset, LAN, sound, graphics, etc. after installing Windows?

 

[superty12]

See this

Read this guide.

 

[LookinAround]

When checking Device Manager, the device is working properly. I have verified on Disk Management, the external hard disk is there but with no Drive letters and paths, it mention "unallocated". It does not allow me to give it a drive letter.

On the "USB device properties", under volume tab, the partition style is: Master Boot Record, capacity:238,473 MB, Unallocated space: 238,473 MB, Reserved space: 0 MB and status: Online

I think the above info is telling. It indicates your problem is filesystem corruption on your external hard drive. (Windows no longer recognizes a valid filesystem on the drive so you see it as "Unallocated" and, as such, it can't be assigned a drive letter.)

Refer to the Guide link superty12 gave you in earlier post. And skip to the section on data recovery. Try using TestDisk (per the Guide) to find and recover the missing data partition and your files on the drive. I've never used it but many people report success in similar situations