Pulled out the USB on my external hard drive without first ejecting
 

I (someone in my family) pulled out the usb wire from our external hard drive from the laptop without ejecting (turning off the device) first.

The drive is no longer recognized by Windows.
Is there anything I can do?

Sorry, it has to be asked: Did you reboot?

It's not recomended practise but you should get away with it. If the drive is not recognized the next time you hook it up, then open up the Disk Management and assign a letter to the drive.

Best of luck.
Yours Zweiblumen

ive done it a few times and gotten away with it. did you take it out as the transfer was in progress?

have you tried some file recovery software that you can download.
have you tried to do a scandisk on it?

have you tried any of the advice in this thread? particularly the MS article?
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/tilted-...ain-ports.html

You have to eject USB drives? I've never done this, ever, to any of my 5 external hard drives and 3 or 4 thumbdrives. I just make sure nothing is writing to it before I disconnect it.

Before removing a hard drive from the system, it must be unmounted. Windows provides a simple graphical interface to perform this.

The drive is recoverable. The procedure and difficulty varies from one OS to the other; Windows XP and/or Vista is surprisingly robust in handling these situations, and 95% of the time will be able to automatically re-mount the device the next time it's connected.

Follow the advice provided above, then report back.

You can tell windows to cache writes to an external drive, or ... never cache writes to an external drive.

If you are caching writes, you get faster performance -- but your data integrity can be screwed if you remove the media before ejecting.

I am going to try the advice and get back to you.
-----Added 23/10/2008 at 12 : 28 : 49-----
***UPDATE
I can see the device in the Device Manager and it says that it is working fine.
I can't see the device in Disk Management.
I can't see the device in Windows Explorer (which was the original problem).

I tried:
- Uninstalling the driver and letting Windows install it the next time I plugged it into the USB drive. The funny thing is that Widows finds it and recognizes it when I plug it into the USB. It shows up in the device manager.
- Ejecting/disabling it.
- Restarting after everything I tried

It still does not show up in Windows Explorer.

Are you absolutely sure it's not in disk management? This sounds verbatim like a drive letter conflict that can be resolved there. Windows knows it's there, device manager sees it, but it's not in Explorer. If it is in disk management it will be odd looking; the only way to tell if it's the disk is by looking at the size.

When I am back at that computer I will try and grab some screen shots or at least provide more information about what I see.

Here are the screen shots.

My Computer - The external USB mass storage device is not listed
http://img133.imageshack.us/img133/9590/mc1ti4.jpg

Device Manager - The device manager shows the device
http://img236.imageshack.us/img236/1222/dm1ci9.jpg

Device Manager Properties - The Device Manager says that the device is "working properly"
http://img384.imageshack.us/img384/2739/dm2jq8.jpg



I don't see the USB mass storage Device in Disk Management

Computer Management Media
http://img386.imageshack.us/img386/4499/cm1yo2.jpg

Computer Management Disk Management
http://img508.imageshack.us/img508/7436/cm2mg9.jpg

have a friend that you can plug it into their PC? just to rule out that the USB drive didn't get fried in some manner?

Do you have any other interfaces for the drive such as firewire 400 or 800 ports? It may be that its only the USB port that's bad.

I am going to try to plug it into my work laptop to see what happens.

As far as the port itself is concerned, it works. The device is recognized by Windows.

i'd not call that a 100% indicator. If you have any other USB devices would say that port works well, I don't trust Windows HAL to know if something works or not.

I tried it in multiple USB ports that work properly for other USB devices (e.e. my mouse).

Disk MGMT looks fine. Try a different cable and on a different PC.

I just tried it on a different machine. Same result. wondows recognizes it when the USB connects but you can see it in Windows Explorer.

I am going to see if I have another cable.

I know this is a question that is an obvious yes, but...

Did you shut the computer down completely, then restart it?

Yes.

HDD regenerator ? you burn it as a bootable disk, and boot from it. And then find your disc through it, and it should fix it. The trial version only fixes the first bad sector it finds, but it might help anyway.