I have an external hard drive for my PC...?

Question

...and I can't access it. It was working fine until I had to delete everything on my internal hard drive. Now my computer's fine. But I can't access my external hard drive anymore. The Device Manager says nothing's wrong with it, it's properly installed, but its icon won't show in the My Computer folder, and I can't access it anywhere else. It's connected by USB, and it's made by SimpleTech. Any ideas?

By the way, before I wiped my internal hard drive, I had installed an alternate operating system on the external hard drive. More specifically, my internal has Windows XP, and my external had Ubuntu.

Answer 1

Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management
Under the Disk Management section you should be able to manually assign a letter to the drive.

As for booting from the drive, when Ubuntu is installed, it adds a menu option to the boot up that allows you to select between OSs. You may have to reinstall the Ubuntu to get the menu re-added to the internal drive.