External Hard drive not fully detected!

Hi
I am having trouble getting my PC to fully detecy a USB mass storage device.

My PC is in such a state, that the IT department lent me this device, so that I can copy over stuff that I want to keep and then completely clear the C:\ drive and start again.

The problem I have is that when I plug it in, XP finds it and says that it is ready to use, but it does not show up anywhere on my PC. I have looked everywhere, disk management etc, it's like it has never been installed! but it shows that it is there when I click on 'safely remove hardware'.

This is so frustrating!

 

Most likely, a network drive has already been assigned the drive letter that Windows would have assigned the USB drive; the result is no drive letter assignment, and it looks like the drive was not recognized. Either right-click My Computer and choose Manage, or Start/Run diskmgmt.msc to bring up the Disk Management Console. You will see a graphic listing all drives recognized on your system - local, mapped, and unassigned (the USB drive). Right-click the area of an unassigned drive and select “Change Drive Letter and path” and then either select an unassigned drive letter, or specify a path or specify an empty path on an existing hard drive to have the drive mounted as a subdirectory of the existing hard drive.

Sam