I had this problem about a year and a half ago and I cannot remember how I finally solved this problem. Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.
So, I am running Windows 7 (32/64) on an Acer Aspire 5251-1805 with a 1TB My Passport Essential SE external hard drive. I reformatted the entire drive and now when I plug it in it is not recognized in Windows Explorer. It does show up in my Device Manager (under disk drives as its name and also under Universal Serial Bus controllers as Mass Storage device), but it is not greyed and it has no yellow exclamation near it. I have gone into Disk Management where it shows up as a blank box for a name (in the several times I’ve done this it is been an alternately blue and light grey box in place of the name) and try as I might I cannot right click it to assign it a drive name. I have unistalled it by uninstalling the named device under disk drives, also uninstalling the USB Mass Storage device under Universal Serial Bus controllers, and uninstalling both together. After uninstalling when I plug the drive back in it does install the driver and says it’s ready to use, but still does not show in Windows Explorer.
This drive was working fine when formatted. And, as I said, I know I formatted this drive sometime in the last year and a half and had this same problem which was resolved, but have no clue how I did it.
Please Help! I’m desperate!
Crymmsun
{*