External harddrive not working?

[Drfoxxx]

Hi i've got a platinum external harddrive here, i've plugged it in and the status on it is green which is obviously good. but my dell, windows 7 laptop is not picking it up at all. Any ideas why please?

[IAntDemo]

Yes, what about bios.. goto restart your laptop and then when it restarts press f2 or del.. I think on dells it's f2 for system setup, have a look in the bios for the harddrive... if it doesn't pick it up their then it's either not attached correct or it's broke..

[Tommy Boy]

Have you tried it on another computer to see if it gets recognized? Another pc in your house or a friend's pc?

What usually happens with external drives is the sata to usb interface goes bad and although the status on the drive itself is good, the drive itself works, your pc just can't read it because of the bad interface.

If this is the case, what you may need to do is get a new enclosure for it, they are pretty cheap, somewhere around 20 bucks usually.

[Indigo]

Before going all apenuts on this, try this:

Connect the drive

Click Start, type DISKMGMT.MSC and hit enter

Check for the external drive in the list. Does it show up as having another drive letter that is already in use, or doesn't have a drive letter at all? Sometimes this happens with hard drives, especially the external / USB kind.