Help! computer can't recognize external hard drive

my external hard drive all of a sudden stopped showing up in "my computer"
and a can't find it anywhere else. it make the hardware sound when I plug it in but nothing shows up. when I plug it in another port it comes up with a message saying "USb device not recognized. one of the usb device attached to this computer has malfunction and windows cannot recognize it...."

can anyone help

 

Use a port that does not give that messgae. Look in Device Manager after you plug it in and see if it is listed under your drives.

See how it appears in Disk Management (right-click Computer, Manage, Disk Management).

 

I have a WD external hard drive...i plug it in and if I'm lucky it makes the noise that it's connected to the computer, then it disconnects. It won't show up on my computer and hasn't for a few months...i need to retrieve my life from it!

HELP

 

when I put it in another port it still makes the sound but doesnt show in disk managment

 

in device manager it comes up as unknown device when conected through a port that shows that message.
and says it doesnt have a driver installed, but it never came with one and use to work,
but in a port that doesnt show the message it doesnt show up at all
I don't know what kind of external hard drive it is, it doesnt have anything written on it

 

Uninstall the "Unknown Device" and reboot with the drive attached and powered up.

 

uninstalling it didnt work so I took it apart and found that its a toshiba HDD2190, do you know where I can download a driver for it from? I tried the toshiba site.

 

There are no drivers needed for drives. There may be a driver for the case, but that would be unusual.

If you have data to recover, you can connect it to the PC internally.

Have you tried it in a different PC? If it doesn't work on a different PC, you can connect the drive internally to see if it works. If it does, then you have a problem with the external case and that needs to be replaced.

If it does work on another PC, then we will know that it is your machine that is the problem and not the drive.