Cannot Access External HDD

[4sak3n]

Greetings

I have a 500GB FreeAgnt external hard drive which has started to play up today. Whenever I plug it in it is detected and assigned a drive letter (usually K) but when I open it a dialog pops up saying "Please insert a disk into K". So Windows is trying to treat my ext HDD like a CD drive.

I am guessing that this might be because I unplugged it without going through the whole "safe to disconnect routine" (although I make a point of doing this each time so I don't see how).

Any ideas on what might be causing this and how to fix it? Have any of you seen this before?

Your help is greatly appreciated.

 

[feo]

Usually when my external gets infected with a virus it stops showing up as a normal drive in My Computer. Usually it will popup with a dialog box that asks you to choose which program you want to open the drive with and other wierd stuff.

If you check Seagate's website, I'm sure you'll find software there that will try to let you recover whatever's one the disk. Once you get the data off of it, format the drive. That's the only way that I've figured out how to solve the problem.

 

[4sak3n]

I manually reassigned it a new drive letter and the drive is now showing up fine and I can access it. Phew! So much for panicking.

Thank you for the help though, very kind of you.