Mac Mini not reading old pc ext hard drive

Have a five year old external hard drive from a previous PC.   I connect it to my Mac Mini and the device listing shows it is there, but the letters are not black.  They are light grey and i am unable to open the drive when i click on the listing.

Sounds like it is not mounted properly, damaged or perhaps is protected by some sort of windows encryption.
Open Disk Utility and see if you select the drive in the list of drives and then mount it using the blue Mount button. If not then disconnect the drive, restart the Mac Mini and reconnect the External Drive.
Now if it is still not mounting and/or you are unable to manually mount it using Disk Utility, it is either damaged and needs repairs or unencrypting using a windows computer. Of course I could be totally wrong about the windows encryption thing, because I don't use them all that much.

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    You can’t accept the re-sell value of your broken iPod
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    Strange error on iPod (probably death)
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    iPod Photo: unhappy icon + warranty question
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    4th Gen iPod Users - are we all having the same problem?
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    Low Battery, and clicking sounds
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    Sad faced iPod, but my computer won’t recognize it
    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=2242018#2242018
    Sad iPod solution
    http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=412033&tstart=0
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