Western Digital portable hard drive won't read on my computer...

I live in canada and bought a portable hard drive from California. It's a WD 160GB portable hard drive. I plugged it into my USB port on the front of my computer and it won't read. Can anyone help?

Are you sure the USB ports you are using are working correctly? Are there software compact disks that came with the external hard drive?

I had this drive before usually it installs its software automatically but most of the time it ****s up so go to the western digital support site and get the drivers then connect it

How is it formatted? I'm assuming it is FAT32, so that means it should automatically be recognized. Check in device manager to see if it shows up there, and is just not mounting.

Yeah it's FAT32. I checked device manager. It's reading perfectly fine. Like the computer knows that it's there, but I'm just not able to access it. I tried looking in My Computer and it was nowhere to be found. Tried downloading drivers for it off the website and nothing works.

I'm guessing its assigned a drive letter already in use... Right click my computer go to manage then go to disk management... If you see it in there it may need to bechanged right click and go to Change Drive Letters and paths make it like R or something high and it will probably show up if not let us know i have other options.

have u got a realy old computer say 5 or so years cos older computers can only read a certen amount of space if this is what it is it can be fixed by doing a bios update

Try pulling the drive out of the case and hooking it up directly.

edit: Oh.. wait a second. Something to do first. Right click on my computer and select "manage". Go to disk management. If you see it in there, give it a drive letter that isn't already used. It will probably show up then.

I tried assigning it to a letter and it actually worked. Many thanks guys. Much appreciated.