Iomega External Hard Drive not recognized on windows 8.1

Question

I wanted to share this with others that may have or do run into the same problem. I used the iomega external drive 1TB on an XP computer for a couple years, then when that computer went bad, hooked it up to a windows 8. This worked perfectly fine, but last week I did the upgrade to windows 8.1 and the drive was no longer able to be read. It showed in disk management as unallocated.
I found a suggestion on using File Scavenger software to recover the data. I did have to pay for that software, but it not only found and recovered all my files, but also found missing daily backups that I thought were failing. Those must have been unreadable because my xp hard drive was starting to go bad.
After recovering and saving all my files to the computer (which did take a long time - 13 hours) I was then able to reformat the external drive, copy my files back to it, and continue to use it as always.
Hope this helps someone else who may be devasted on losing important or precious files.

Answer 1

The hard drive will not show up on the sidebar or desktop unless Finder preferences are set to do that:
In Finder's General preference section, make sure "External disks" is checked in the list of things to show on the desktop if you want to see them there.
Likewise, in Finder's Sidebar preference section, make sure "External disks" is checked in the "DEVICES" section to see them automatically appear on the sidebar.
But you don't need to do either for the MBP to recognize the drive, or to get files from its Time Machine backup set. To do that, you should use the Time Machine "Star Wars" interface. Pondini's FAQ's (already mentioned) tell you how to do that. Tip 17 is particularly relevant.