Lightroom 4 Quit Recognizing External Drive

I am running LR4.3 on a Vista 32 bit system. I have a new Toshiba external drive that has been storing my work from lightroom. All has been working great until last night. I was working on photos and all of a sudden a banner came across the top saying photos is missing or offline and then that the folder was missing. The external drive was still plugged in but not lit up. I unplugged it and shut everything down (multiple times) but the drive has disappeared from the selectable drives on the left hand side. I can access the external drive through windows and my photos are there but LR4.3 does not see it. How can I get LR to see the drive again?

toomanytaken wrote:
I don't think the drive is asleep. I can access it through computer and see all the photos there. The work I did in LR is not there but the originals are. A drive F is grayed out in LR and I don't know where that came from. I don't have that drive on my pc.
The drive may not be in "sleep" mode now, but it probably dozed off while you were working in LR. Do you understand what I'm saying?
USB storage devices are assigned a "temporary" drive letter designation when plugged into a USB port on your computer. It normally uses the next available letter, unless assigned a permanent drive letter as suggested. Any phone, ipod, or other device with storage you plug into your system's USB port(s) temporarily takes up another drive letter. You probably had a phone, ipod, camera or other usb device plugged into your system when this problem occured, and then later removed it. See an example here:
http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/external_drive_frustration
I suggest first assigning a permanent drive letter first, such as M: or even Z: to prevent future conflicts:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/window-on-windows/how-do-i-force-windows-to-assign-a-driv e-letter-to-an-external-hard-drive-when-attached/631
Once completed use the 'Locate Missing Folders' procedure here to reassociate your photos's with edits inside Lightroom:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/lightroom/using/WSE828B644-9097-46ab-98A7-E2719BBB6647.html#WS 43660fa5a9ec95a81172e081234ea5bf2d-8000
Message was edited by: trshaner
'Locate Missing Folders' added

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