External hard drive does not show up in Explorer/My Computer

[nubki11a]

Hello everyone!

I just built my new computer and everything seems to be working fine hardware-wise. I put in my old hard drive which still has Windows Vista 32-bit on it. It booted up fine (booting up and shutting down is extremely slow though), I installed some of my motherboard drivers (LAN driver, USB drivers etc.)

I am going to install Windows 7 Home Premium on it as soon as I have backed up some important documents, music and programs. However, my external hard drive (USB) does not show up in My Computer! I checked the Hardware panel thing (Apparaatbeheer), and it does show up there. Is there any other way I can access it or are there any fixes? I tried deleting some HighFilters in the registry, but this caused my PC to go in a reboot-loop.
Could I transfer files over a LAN-network to my laptop?

I have just installed CrashPlan, could I use that to back-up all my files? I don't want to pay for it and my upload speed is quite low (around 700kB/s and I want to back up over 22GB).

TL;DR: I cannot see my external hard drive in Windows, is there any other way I can access it, or backup my files (22GB+)?

I can provide any additional information.

Thanks in advance!

 

[nubki11a]

/Close http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows/find-your-missing-usb-drive-on-windows-xp/ This worked for me

It didn't have a drive letter. I had to activate it as a partition or something, but it shows up and I can access it now, and that's what counts