Why is my external hard drive not recognized by Windows?

Although unlikely, you may need a driver. What does device manager show?

Also is your external formatted with the same partition type as your Win 7? IE NTFS?

Did you get a pop up asking to run with administrative credentials. Win 7 will do that.

I had a similar problem with win 7, I cannot remember the reason for the problem but try this solution. Go to:
Control Panel
Admin tools
Computer management
Disk management
(hopefully you can see your drive) right click on the drive header and select ‘Online’

Good luck

right click on the drive header and select ‘Online’

Or maybe “Change Drive Letter and Paths”

@mrlaconic

The Device Manager does say that the drivers are up to date. Not sure about the formatting, and I don’t recall any popup.

@Odysseus

I don’t see any option called “Online”.

The drive might be formatted in HFS +

There are some drivers available for it, although the most compete one appears to be paid-for rather than free, which sucks a bit.

How can I find out how the drive is formatted?

Right click on my computer, manage, go to disk management under storage. It will show all connected discs and show the letter (IE C:) and then the size and the table type (FAT, FAT32, NTFS etc) right next to the size.

Win 7 is designed by default to ask you to confirm the device is safe to install even if you have admin rights.

@mrlaconic

Alright, I did that and I see one disk that’s 465 GB, which I’m assuming is my external hard drive, because it couldn’t really be anything else. There’s nothing listened under “File System”, only a blank space.

Also, my computer’s hard drive is an NTFS solid state drive.

OK what drive letter is it assigning that disc 465GB drive as? I have seen like with USB keys there will be a conflict with one letter and you can get the drive to show up by changing the drive letter.

Right click on the disc and select change drive letter and disc and change it to I or something.

Please make sure you don’t change the drive letter for the drive windows is installed on my mistake.

It won’t let me click “Change Drive Letter…”; it’s grayed out.

I had the same problem with my external hard drive (I think it might have even been the same brand). The problem ended up being that the drive was password-protected. I had completely forgotten that it had previously asked me to set a password. I had to input my password before it would unlock; after I did that it started showing up under My Computer.