External Hard Drives Not Appearing In My Computer

youngone90

I'm hoping someone on this board can help me. So, my brother passed away recently and some of his stuff has been passed to me. He had 3 external hard drives. One is a Buffalo Ministation, one a Samsung Story Station and the other is (I think) a Freecom XS. I myself have one of the Seagate expansion drives. My own one, and the buffalo ministation, appear in 'my computer' as soon as I plug them in (my seagate must be plugged in at the mains but the ministation only needs to be connected to a USB port) but when I plug in the Samsung and the Freecom, they do not appear in My Computer. When I go into device manager they are visible, and Windows says the devices are working but I cannot see any way to view the files. They both need to be plugged in at the mains as well, and all the connections are fine. I can hear the drives 'buzzing' so they are definitely running.

So am I missing something blatantly obvious? I'll be the first to admit, and you can probably tell from the post, that I really do not have much knowledge at all in this area. Do I need some sort of software to read the drives? I have done a few google searches but I haven't come up with much, and to be honest most of it didn't make sense to me. I know they were all working fine a matter of weeks ago so I really don't think it is a hardware issue, nor do I think it is an issue with my computer as the other two drives work fine (and I've tried using different USB ports).

Any help would be greatly appreciated (especially if you could 'dumb it down' a little ).

free4440273

try another -- shorter -- usb cable too //

youngone90

free4440273 wrote: »

try another -- shorter -- usb cable too //

Thanks for your reply. Why is that? I'm not sure I have another. I'm pretty sure there were no problems at all with the cables when my brother was using them.

KillerWatt

Are the 2 drives partitioned and formatted?

Right click on My Computer, select "Manage" from the context menu, then click on "Disk Management" in the left hand pane and post back what it says.

PS
Unless the USB cable you are using is more than 5 metres long, you can forget that as the cause (especially as it already works with one of the drives).

youngone90

Um it says:
Disk 1
Basic
1397.26 GB
Online

then beside it: 1397.26 GB Unallocated

is this what you mean?

Edit: they must already be formatted as they were used a lot and there is definitely a lot of files on them.

KillerWatt

The drive needs partitioning and formatting (it is a 1.5 TB drive).

Right click in the area that says "Unallocated", select the option to partition the drive, then format it using the NTFS filing system.
If you are asked about cluster size, set it to 4096.

SnowTiger

youngone90 wrote: »

Edit: they must already be formatted as they were used a lot and there is definitely a lot of files on them.

Perhaps the contents of the drives is encrypted?

KillerWatt

SnowTiger wrote: »

Perhaps the contents of the drives is encrypted?

That would not produce the message that the space is unallocated.
You would still see the drive in My Computer, you just wouldn't be able to access the data.

youngone90

KillerWatt wrote: »

The drive needs partitioning and formatting (it is a 1.5 TB drive).

Right click in the area that says "Unallocated", select the option to partition the drive, then format it using the NTFS filing system.
If you are asked about cluster size, set it to 4096.

The only options available are 'New Simple Volume', 'Properties' and 'Help'?

KillerWatt

youngone90 wrote: »

The only options available are 'New Simple Volume', 'Properties' and 'Help'?

Go for New Simple Volume and then go back to the beginning and check it's status in Disk Management.

If it says the drive is ready for use then all well & good, if not then you need to right click on that drive again and select the option to format using the NTFS filing system.

youngone90

So will this wipe any data that was on them?