External Hard drive not even showing up on my desktop

I am plugging in my external hard drive and nothing happens. Did I do something to erase the whole thing? Why doesn't it show up at all on my desktop?

I get this problem every now and again. I noticed it occurs after being used with a windows pc. For some reason if my external hard drive hasn't been ejected properly when on a windows pc it won't show up on my mac at all, not even in disk utility.
Solution that works for me:
Simply plug it back into a windows pc and properly eject it by right clicking the drive and slecting eject.
If you don't have a pc to hand or can't be bothered boot camping, you can run a virtual instance of windows in parrelles desktop and select the hard drive with the usb devices menu.
Hope this helps someone.

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