USB drives are SUPPOSED to be recognized as "Local Disks" in "My Computer".  The 
alternative to "Local Disk" is "Network Drive".  

So getting the hard drive "back to external drive" is irrelevant.  What you need 
to do is fix the damage that was apparently done to the drive's partition table, 
which is causing the PC to not recognize that the drive is formatted.  

If you can use recovery software to copy your data (or most of it) off the drive 
onto another one, that's what I'd do FIRST.  In case the drive is failing, you want 
to get as much data off of it as you can, before it gets worse, and possibly fails 
completely.

If you're able to get all your valuable data copied off of it using data recovery 
software, then you can try to reformat the drive and, if that goes well, perhaps 
put it back into service.  If you are NOT able to get your data copied off of it, 
I'd first try spinrite, from www.spinrite.com.  It will likely take many hours to 
run, but it's VERY good in this situation.  It will (hopefully) restore your drive 
back to normal...but, in case it doesn't, or in case your drive dies during the process, 
it will be good if you've first rescued as much data as possible from it.

If you run Spinrite and that doesn't help, then you'll want to try software that 
repairs the partition table, like this:  http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

 







On Monday, April 14, 2008 at 6:27 pm, stan wrote:

>I have a WD external hard drive with a USB connection. I stored pictures and music 

>that I recovered from a bad hard drive and also backup my current hard drive to 
it 

>using Sync Back. My computer has always recognized the drive as an external drive 

>like a SD card or USB flash thumb drive. Last week when I was downloading some pictures 

>from an email, I decided to download to the external drive, which did not work. 
My 

>computer now only recognizes the hard drive as a local disk and tells me that the 

>drive isn’t formatted when I try to access it, and would I like to format it. I 
have 

>not reformatted it, because I don’t want to lose my files. The files are still on 

>the disk, I checked using a recovery program. What do I need to do to get the disk 

>back to the previous status as an external drive and not a local one?

>

>Thank you for your assistance 
 

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