Windows 8 External hard drive not being recognized

Right click it. select "change drive letter and paths". Add and, if it suits, accept the default letter.

Depending on the HD, you may have to do this whenever you boot.

Just t be clear this is not disk 1 I assume. First make sure you are not using a cable longer than the one supplied or connecting through a hub. If it is a powered drive try plugging directly into the wall instead of the surge protector. If this is a desktop try a USB port on the back, sometimes that makes a difference. Make sure the USB drivers are all up to date. If it is disk 1 try assigning a letter to it.
Joe

davehc said:

Right click it. select "change drive letter and paths". Add and, if it suits, accept the default letter.

Depending on the HD, you may have to do this whenever you boot.

Click to expand...

I tried but for some reason it is blacked out, it wont let me click it.

Drive 0 appears to be the Lenovo system with its normal partitions.

Drive 1 seems to have an EFI System partition and is set as GPT. Do you know what is on Drive 1 and why it has a EFI partition? Which System partition are you booting to? To find out, Open and Administrative Command prompt and type bcdedit then copy and paste the results.

@Saltgrass "The boot configuration data store could not be opened, access is denied" thats what I got

Is Drive 1 the external drive and you can boot normally without it?

I think you need to use Diskpart to clean that drive and get whatever those remnants, wherever they came from, off that drive. You just need to make sure you are not booting to it.

Possibly what is going on with Bcdedit is the two EFI partitions are confusing it, but not sure. You will get that message if you are not using the Administrative version of the Command Prompt window. It should show Administrative at the top.

If you have data on it you need to move and you can't access it, we may see if we can just remove the EFI partition, which diskpart can do, probably with the override switch. But let us know what you think.

Yeah Disk1 is it. I unplugged and put it back in at it was disk1. It still wont let me change anything. @Saltgrass

If you don't have data on it or something you really need to keep, open the Admin command prompt again and use diskpart to clean the drive.

The following are the commands you would use, with an Enter after each line. Just make very sure you are looking at the correct drive before you clean it. One way to make sure is to list the partitions and see if they agree with what you see in disk management.

Diskpart
list disk

The one you want should be Disk 1, but make sure.

list partition

If the partitions agree with the drive you want,

clean

If you want it converted to GPT,

convert gpt

exit
You should now be able to format the drive as necessary. If you convert the Drive to GPT from within Windows, it will put the 128 MB MSR partition at a 17K offset. If you want to install something on the drive, you may need to clean it again, or use Diskpart to remove that partition or during the actual Install process.

I got it

so I did that, but the disk1 is not coming up. It has 933 GB of storage and it wont show up in cmd.

Saltgrass said:

If you got the drive cleaned, in Disk Management, you will have to initialize the drive by clicking on the left end and selecting initialize. After the drive is initialized you can format it and add a drive letter.

I have done the clean option on a drive to show you how it goes.

Click to expand...

it says un allocated what do I do from there

Okay now I got it. My computer is now backed up