Toshiba 1TB External Hard Drive not recognized on Desktop but seen by Laptop (both are HP)

[kspeacht]

I have the Toshiba 1TB External Hard Drive (Toshiba Automatic Backup Portable Drive) and have used it for about a year with no issues. Today, I went to retrieve something from it and suddenly my desktop can not seem to find it. I have Vista Home Premium and I have done what so many people have said to do. I can find it when I look at the device manager under disk drives but when I go to Computer>Manage> Disk Management, it is not seen. It seems a lot of people are having this issue and no one can seem to answer why it is happening. It is not the usb cable and it is not the TB drive because I can hook the external drive up to my laptop and it works. BUT I don't need the things that are on the drive on my laptop. I need them on my computer. They are things I need for work. Any help with this would be VERY appreciated by apparently, a ton of people who I see posting the same issue. Oh, I forgot to mention my laptop has windows 8. I don't think the different versions of Windows has anything to do with the problem though.

 

[rgd1101]

try different usb connector on the desktop?

 

[kspeacht]

try different usb connector on the desktop?

I haven't tried another USB because the one that this uses has quite a strange end on it. The end that plugs in to the external drive has quite a large dip in it. At first I thought it was broken but the USB cable fits correctly into it. I don't have another one to try. I guess I would have to order a new one or something but I don't want to spend more money on something if I am not sure what is causing the issue to start with. I don't have cash to just throw around buying things that I hope will fix it. This seems like a problem a LOT of people are having. There has to be a solution for it. I can't find one useful thing on the Toshiba site.

 

[faithyj]

I am having a similar problem. The light is on and I need it plugged into my laptop to access my windows login password. However, it shows no data and gives me the 'this drive is corrupted' statement when I try to access files. Very frustrating since I saved EVERYTHING on it.