Fix External Hard Drive Not Showing Up Without Losing Data

Quick Answer: What to Do When an External Hard Drive Is Not Showing Up

When an external hard drive is not showing up, follow these steps in order:

1. Check the USB cable, port, power supply, and connection.

2. Open Disk Management and check whether Windows detects the drive.

3. If the drive appears in Disk Management, check its status:

• No drive letter: assign a drive letter.
• Unallocated: do not create a new volume if you need the existing files. Use free data recovery software to recover files first.
• Offline: try bringing the disk online.

4. If the drive does not appear in Disk Management, check if it shows up in Device Manager. If yes, try updating or reinstalling the driver.

5. If Windows still cannot detect the drive, the external enclosure, USB interface, or hard drive itself may have a hardware problem.

When you connect your external hard drive to a computer via a USB port, trying to access data, manage files, or update the backup, you may disappointedly find that it is not even showing up.

Why Is My External Hard Drive Not Showing Up

An external hard drive may fail to appear in File Explorer for different reasons. The most useful first distinction is whether Windows can detect the physical disk.

Case 1: The External Hard Drive Appears in Disk Management

If the drive appears in Disk Management but not File Explorer, Windows can detect the disk, but the volume may not currently be accessible through a drive letter or a usable file system.

Common situations include:

• The partition has no drive letter.
• The disk is Offline.
• The disk partition is deleted or lost.
• The partition or file system has been damaged.

If the drive contains important files, do not initialize, format, or create a new volume on it simply to make it appear in File Explorer. Recover the important data first.

Case 2: The External Hard Drive Does Not Appear in Disk Management

If the external hard drive is missing from both File Explorer and Disk Management, the problem is more likely related to the physical connection, USB port, power supply, driver, USB-to-SATA enclosure, or the drive hardware.

Try the basic connection checks before making changes to the disk.

How to Recover Data from an External Hard Drive Not Showing Up on Windows

If the drive appears in Disk Management but you cannot access the files, data recovery should come before formatting or repartitioning.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery can scan external hard drives for files when partitions are lost, the space is unallocated, or the file system is inaccessible.

You can use this tool to recover all types of data that have not been overwritten from your external hard disk. This tool allows you to restore 1 GB of data for free.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery FreeClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

Step 1: Scan the external hard drive.

On the main interface of the recovery tool, choose the problematic partition to scan under the Logical Drives section. If the whole external hard drive not showing up, you are suggested to scan the entire drive in the Devices tab.

Step 2: Locate the required files on the result page.

Wait patiently until the scan process is completed. There should be numerous files on the result page. To help you locate the required files quickly, this software contains several useful features.

• The Filter feature allows you to set the filter criteria, such as file size, file type, file category, and last modified date.
• The Type feature will list files according to file types and file formats.
• The Search feature enables you to search files with their complete or partial names.

Step 3: Choose the wanted files and recover them.

After finding the demand files from the file list, you can tick the boxes in front of them and click the Save button. In the prompt small window, choose a restoration path that is different from the original one. Saving files to the original path might cause data overwriting, leading to data recovery failure.

A window will prompt you to inform that the restoration is finished. Please note that the free edition only provides 1GB of free data recovery capacity.

USB Drive Not Recognized: How to Fix It and Recover Data

Learn how to fix a USB drive not recognized in Windows, recover data from an unrecognized USB, and resolve driver, port, and disk issues.

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How to Recover Data from External Hard Drive Not Recognized on Mac

If you find the external hard drive doesn’t show up on a Mac and want to recover files from it on a Mac, you can try Stellar data recovery for Mac. This software is designed to recover files from Mac and other removable devices, including external hard drives.

Data Recovery for MacClick to Download100%Clean & Safe

You can read this post to learn how to use Stellar Data Recovery for Mac to recover data from an external hard drive on Mac: [SOLVED] How To Recover Deleted Files On Mac | Complete Guide. But the free edition of this software only allows you to detect and check files. In order to complete the data recovery process, you need to get a registered edition.

7 Methods to Fix External Hard Drive Not Showing Up

After the investigation, we find external HDD not detected problem is mainly caused by the following seven reasons. And we give the corresponding countermeasures for each case. You can try them one by one no matter whether you want to find an external hard drive on a Mac or a Windows system.

1. Assign/change a drive letter

When a drive letter is missing, the corresponding hard drive will not appear on the computer. Besides, when there’s a conflict between the external hard drive letter and the local drive letter, it will not show up on the computer, either.

At this time, you only need to assign a drive letter to your external hard drive or change a letter for it to solve the problem. You can adopt both the built-in disk management tool and the third-party manager like MiniTool Partition Wizard to accomplish this task.

2. Reinstall/Update the USB driver

Sometimes, the driver of your external hard drive may be corrupted or outdated, so you need to reinstall or update the USB driver to solve the problem.

How to reinstall USB driver: open Device Manager in your favorite way > expand Disk drives > select your external hard drive > right-click on it > choose Uninstall device from the context menu -> click on Uninstall in the pop-up confirm window.

As for how to update the USB driver, the steps are similar. You should also open Device Manager and find your external hard drive. But after that, you should choose Update Driver. Of course, you can choose to disable and re-enable the USB controller to have a try.

3. Power on the external hard drive

If your external hard drive is not provided with a sufficient power supply, it can’t show up on the computer. This is a common phenomenon.

Under such circumstances, you should power on the external hard drive which has its own power switch or separate power cable.

4. Don’t use USB hubs

The reason why we advise you to avoid USB hub is also related to power supply. Some USB hubs are not able to provide enough power supply to the external hard drive. In contrast, you should plug the external hard drive directly into one of your computer’s USB ports.

5. Try a different USB port or computer

When the USB port on the computer that you have used to connect your external hard drive is dead, you can’t see the drive on the computer no matter what you do. Besides, when the system driver of your computer has problems, you will fail to see the external hard drive on this computer anyhow.

You should try a different USB port or computer in this case to exclude the problem.

6. Repair the system’s built-in drivers

• Press F8 or another button to enter the safe mode during the boot process, select restart or shutdown the computer, and power on it later to enter the normal mode (to repair the registry).
• If the problem persists, perform a system restore in order to restore your system to an earlier point when there’s no such problem.
• If the problem persists, please use the system disk to repair it. Open the command prompt, enter SFC / scannow, press Enter, and insert the original system disk to repair the system automatically.
• If the problem persists, please set the CD-ROM as the first boot device in the BIOS; then, insert the system installation disc and press the R key to select repair installation.
• If the problem still persists, we advise you to reinstall your OS.

7. Set parameters in CMOS

For people who have never used USB external devices on their current computer, even if they have installed the driver properly, the system still cannot detect USB hard disks. This is because the CMOS port of the motherboard is closed by default.

At this time, you should set it as enabled: reboot to enter the CMOS settings window > find PNP/PCI CONFIGURATION > make Legacy USB Support enabled (different computers are slightly different in terms of expression).

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Summary

When an external hard drive does not appear, first determine whether Windows detects the physical drive in Disk Management. If it appears there, check its drive letter and partition status, but avoid formatting or initializing it when important files are still stored on it.

If the drive does not appear in Disk Management, check the USB cable, port, power supply, another computer, and Device Manager.

Please feel free to leave a short message below if you have any questions and contact us when have trouble using MiniTool software via [email protected].