Hey there, jtbailey.
Would you please post a screenshot of what you're talking about exactly? Have you checked if the drive is properly recognized in Disk Management and/or Device Manager? If "yes" would you be so kind as to post screenshots of those tools as well? Do you have data which you need to recover?
Basically this might mean that Windows is having trouble with recognizing the HDD. Is it an external or an internal drive? Give it a go with a different USB cable (or different SATA cables and ports if it's an internal drive), to see if the same thing happens. You should also try the drive with a different computer if you have that option.
If you don't need to recover data, I'd also recommend that you download the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic tool and run the tests, to see what's the situation with the drive. If you want to recover files, check at least the drive's SMART data.
Hope that helps. Please let me know how everything goes.
Boogieman_WD