Western Digital HD doesn't show up

[GeekGirlHere]

I just bought a Western Digital My Book 500GB external hard drive. I am connecting with USB 2.

I am using a Dell laptop and when I plug it in I have no problems the drive shows up in My Computer.

But when I plug it into a different machine at the office it won't show up in my computer. I know it's connected and working properly and I checked the drivers and they are current on the desktop.

This drive is for our backups so it's really important that it's up and running but I have no idea why it won't show up in my computer, I can't save a backup to it if the machine doesn't see it in my computer. When I go to Device manager it sees it just fine. Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!

 

[Apokalipse]

Some USB ports don't provide enough power for certain devices, which usually includes external hard drives.

 

[GeekGirlHere]

OK, I know what the problem is. On this machine there are 4 other mapped drives from the network. The hard drive is defaulting to drive letter 'F', which is the same letter that is already being used from the mapped drive. Is there a way that I can change the drive letter that the drive uses?

 

[ZenOswyn]

Drive letters for external devices like flash drives and portable drives are dynamically assigned when windows recognizes it.

Do any lights come on when you plug the drive in? Does anything happen at all on the PC or the drive?

 

[Apokalipse]

OK, I know what the problem is. On this machine there are 4 other mapped drives from the network. The hard drive is defaulting to drive letter 'F', which is the same letter that is already being used from the mapped drive. Is there a way that I can change the drive letter that the drive uses?

you can manually assign drive letters in diskmgmt.msc (type that in start -> run)