Hey everyone, it’s Mihail here to keep providing you with simple and feasible data solutions.
Today I am going to show you how to fix external hard drive not showing you on computer.
We use external hard drive frequently in our life to store our all kinds of data including
photos, videos, document, etc.
It should be easy to use.
You just need to plug it in, it appears on your computer, and you can drag files right
on over.
But sometimes you may connect your drive to a PC with a USB port and find the external
hard drive isn’t showing up.
Usually, this problem has several possible causes:
Using a broken USB port Partition issues on the external drive
Using wrong file system Driver is either corrupted or outdated
Therefore, according to these causes, I will show you the troubleshooting ways to fix the
problem of “external hard drive not showing up”.
Check the Drive in Disk Management
First, let’s check if the external hard drive shows up in the Disk Management.
Press Windows key + X (or right click the Start button), select Disk Management from
the list.
Or you can also press Windows + R to run a dialog and enter diskmgmt.msc to open the
Disk Management.
After that, you will see that Disk Management will show all the hard disks connected to
your computer with some disk information.
You should see your external hard drive also listed in Disk Management window, even if
it doesn’t appear in the This PC window because it doesn’t contain any partitions,
it should show up here as Removable.
If you see the drive here, you should try to initialize the drive so it’s usable.
Try to do “Create a New Volume and Assign a Drive Letter.”
In this way, you’ll partition and/or format it properly so Windows and other devices can
access it.
You will need to create a new partition on it if your removable drive shows only Unallocated
space.
That can help Windows to use it.
To do so, Right click on the Unallocated space,
Select New Simple Volume option, and then follow the wizard to create a new partition.
Once finished partitioning the drive, restart your computer to see if deletes your external
hard drive.
If your drive is partitioned but it still not shows up, ensure you’ve set a drive
letter so you can access it in Windows.
Press Windows key + R and type diskmgmt.msc to open Disk Management.
In Disk Management, right click on your hard drive and select Change Drive Letter and Paths.
Click Add if your hard drive doesn’t have a drive letter, or click Change if your drive
has a drive letter already.
Make sure to select Assign the following drive letter, then select a drive letter you want,
and click OK.
If the drive appears partitioned, but you still can’t access it, it’s probably partitioned
with a different file system.
For example, you may have formatted the drive with the XFS file system from Linux or APFS
on a Mac.
Windows can’t read these file systems.
You’ll thus need to reformat the drive with the newer NTFS or older FAT32 file system
so Windows will be able to recognize it.
You can format the drive in the Disk Management, just right-click it and select Format.
But please make sure you have back up all your important data on it to another device
before formatting.
If your external hard drive is still not showing up, continue on.
You’ll need to determine why your drive isn’t recognized.
It’s possible you have a hardware issue, driver problem, or a dead drive.
Try Another USB Port (or Another PC) A broken USB port maybe be most direct reason
why an external hard drive is not detected by computer.
If you plug an external hard drive to into a USB port but it doesn’t show up, you can
unplug the drive from its current USB port and try plugging it into another port on your
computer.
If it works, the previous USB port may be broken or dead.
If the external hard drive does not recognize on Windows, try to plug the hard disk into
another computer to check if it is detected.
If the drive can be detected on other computers, and the original computer may have a driver
problem.
You can check for this using the Device Manager.
Troubleshoot Driver Issues
(1) Press Windows key + X, select Device Manager in the list;
(2) Expand the Disk drives category and check for any devices with a yellow exclamation
point next to them.
If you see this symbol, that device has a driver problem.
(3) Right-click the drive with the issue, select Properties to see the error message,
which can help you fix the problem.
If it still doesn’t work, you can try Update Driver option.
(1) Go to Device Manager by pressing Win+R together to open the “Run” dialog, enter
devmgmt.msc. (2) Locate the external hard drive from the
list.
(3) If you see a yellow/red sign appearing against the driver, right-click on drive and
select “Update Driver Software”, then select “Search automatically for updated
driver software” option and follow the instruction to finish the process.
Following those methods above should fix most of the issues of external hard drive not recognized.
If you’ve tried the external hard drive with multiple computers and it never shows
up in the Disk Management window after these steps, the drive is probably broken.
By the way, after you fix the problem, if your data loss from the external hard drive
and need to recover, don’t forget to try Recoverit, one of the most professional data
recovery software.
Anyway, hope all these processes can help you to fix external hard drive not showing
up.
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