External HD question

Basar

I have a Western Digital MyBook 500 GB. It was all fine and dandy before I took a 4 hour flight with it in my carry-on. Now that I am at a new location with a new computer, I plug it in and Windows recognizes it (I see it under Disk Drives in Device Manager) but I cannot see it in the "My Computer" list. What's wrong? I can see it on the Safely Remove Drive thing on system tray as well.

I have like all my photos on it (like 10+ years) so I would cry like a little girl if I can't get it working

Scrublet

First, the dumb question...how long did you wait before you gave up? For whatever reason, my guitarist's external hard drive takes 3-5 minutes to register on my laptop's My Computer even though the Safely Remove thing comes on.

Don't worry about your stuff it's definitely still on there, worst case is you plug it into someone else's comp to get the stuff off. Though it goes without saying that you should have two copies of anything you care about.

AtomBomb

Right click on My Computer, choose Manage, and then click on Disk Management. If you see the drive in there, right click on it and assign it a letter. My guess is that will get you fixed.