Why doesn't my computer recognize my WD External Hard Drive, and how can I get it to?

Can you go to the control panel and under hardware, select add new device. Let the computer try to search for the external hard drive.

There are a couple of possibilities. The most benign is that you need to swap out the USB Cable, or switch ports. The least benign is that you have suffered a crash (not uncommon with Western Digital drives)

If switching cables doesn’t help, download a free program from Piriform called Recuva, and see if Recuva can “see” the drive. If it can, let it run, and you may get your data back. (But of course, you have a backup so we’re not worried about that, right?)