I'm sure nobody really cares, but I did figure out what to do. First I checked the pinned thread at the top that discussed problems with hard drives not being recognized. My hdd wasn't recognized in the BIOS, so that thread did not help me at all. I did a lot of unplugging and plugging it back in to no avail. Whenever I plugged it back in, however, a little bubble would pop up saying something along the lines of "Your USB device is not recognized", so I clicked that. That brought me to a list of my USB devices, so I double clicked on the unrecognized one so I could configure it. After some exploring, I decided to try to uninstall the drivers. I did that then unplugged it and plugged it back in and it worked.
TL;DR: I uninstalled the drivers.