Computer Hope

I do hear a consistent soft spining an clicks or other sounds. If device management does see it, what would it tell me, and where would it take me from there?

I never went to device management in win 11 until now as i read your suggestion. Like I said earlier that the hd is spinning softly and no sound effects; In Dev Mang I do not see a diagrom of all my hd's like i have seen in previous window versions, but a list and one of them says "Disc Drives", which is the one I suppose to open....but for some strange reason i could not get the cursor to go to that link and open it up. Being a Novice in win 11, do you know how i or a better way to open dev mang.? I used the windows logo and R to emter tje syntax.?

OK, I had some luck this last time. The HD icon is shown as LG ( my TV ) and working properly. From past expieriences that response is typical even if you do have a problem, So we know its spinning contnously and soft with no weird sounds accompanying it, In Win 11 i do not see the typical layout that I have seen up to win 7, where you can add a drive letter, format, partition and etc, Perhaps its because I had changed win 11 start to a classic look, that is why i get a list of folders when i go to
Devmgmt.msc. Not knowledgable about HD's in this case, is there any other way to try and format the portable drive?

The cliks are definitely a good sign...how old is this drive ? ?

If you review BC-Programmer's 2nd reply you will find that he asked if the external drive was acknowledged in "DISK" Management and not device management.
Right click on the Windows logo and select Disk Management from the resulting menu.

Windows acknowledge it and "Disk management does also. The reading says: 465  76 gb Raw   Healthy primary partition. So where does that leave me? Apparently, I cannot use it again as my PVR recorder, cause it would not do so anymore. Should I attempt to reformat it?