External Hard Drive Not Working – Analysis & Troubleshooting

It cannot be denied that we’re getting more and more used to having an external hard drive for data storage and backup, with the continuous development of hardware technology. But, have you ever thought about this: the external hard drive may corrupt someday, without leaving you a chance to transfer the data out? What a heartbreak thing it will be when you find the external hard drive stopped working!

Today, I will lay my focus on the external hard drive not working problem. Firstly, I’ll divide this problem into mainly four situations:

a). external hard disk not detected;
b). external hard drive not accessible;
c). external hard drive dead;
d). external hard drive physical damage.

Then, I’ll briefly analyze these situations one by one and give corresponding solutions to help you recover data from external hard drive which is not working, with professional data recovery software. After that, I’ll summarize some practical measures to troubleshoot the problem when the external hard drive is not working on the computer.

Undeniably, a wonderful tool can help you yield twice the result with half the effort when performing hard drive recovery.

Classification of External Hard Drive Not Working Issue

In reality, the external hard drive not working problem can be divided into mainly 4 situations.

1. External Hard Drive Not Recognized or Not Detected

"I have an IOGEAR 160GB External USB Hard Drive (GHD135C160) and it is not being fully recognized. I have a Win Me system, 512M, P3. When the drive is connected via USB and turned on, the removable disk icon(unplug or eject hardware) shows up on the lower right corner of my screen, it does show up under Device Manager -> under disk drives, but when opening My Computer it is not recognized there.
There are no drivers for this drive for Win Me, IOGEAR web page does not indicate any for this OS, it says Plug and Play. Please help me by offering suggestions to get my external drive recognized."CNET Storage Forum

As Altezza said, he found that his external hard drive not showing up in My Computer, but does show up in Device Manager. The two most probable causes of this phenomenon are the lack of drive letter or partition.

2. External Hard Drive Inaccessible

"I have a 1TB Toshiba Canvio Basics 3.0 Portable Hard Drive. After plugging it in, a check disk window pop upped and I chose the option to automatically fix file system errors and scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors but was interrupted because a friend of mine got impatient and clicked cancel. After that, my hard drive became inaccessible. When I tried opening the hard drive an error message appeared: Corrupted Hard Drive the Parameter is incorrect.
After searching for a solution to that problem, I found sites that said that using cmd CHKDSK on the hard drive might fix the problem. So I ran CHKDSK using cmd and I think it got interrupted again. I left it alone for half a day and when I checked it again, the cmd was gone. I assumed that it was already finished running CHKDSK but when I tried accessing my hard drive again it said that I needed to format the disk before I could use it. When clicking cancel, an error again appeared: Location is not available. A: is not accessible. The volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system is loaded and that the volume is not corrupted.
Any Idea how to fix it? Is it still fixable? All my important files are there so I'm a little worried. I appreciate all the help that I will get."BleepingComputer Forum

The user said that his 1TB Toshiba Canvio Basics 3.0 portable hard drive has become inaccessible and the access is still denied by the computer after he has tried running CHKDSK in cmd.

3. External Hard Drive Corrupted/Dead

"I'm using 80GB external hard disk for my study used... When I brought it to my Uni's computer laptop today, it was hanging and without access. It shows the message 'the file and directory is corrupted and unreadable', could you please let me know what's the matter with my hard disk? I don't have any backup, it's so awful for me to lose that information which is stored on my hard disk.... please... I need help...."TechRepublic Forum

When connecting the external hard drive to the computer, Cginkiad discovered that his drive was corrupted and unreadable. Since he has no backup, he is afraid of losing important information. But luckily, the dead external hard drive recovery is possible.

4. External Hard Drive Not Working After Dropping

"I have an external Maxtor hard drive and I dropped it from my desk to a thin carpet floor. I plug it in and it just makes a clicking noise and then after 4 minutes or so, it stops clicking and no noise comes out. When I click on my computer it is not there 🙁 The green light is still on the external hard drive though.
I can't believe a little drop to the floor can ruin it. It has a hard casing around it. What can I do? Can it still be saved? Help!!!"Tech Support Guy Forum

This user heard his external Maxtor hard drive make a clicking noise right after it had been dropped from desk to floor. Soon after that, he finds the external hard drive is not responding (stops clicking and disappears from My Computer).

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Recover Data from External Hard Drive Which Is Not Working

When an error is detected on the external hard drive, the two most important things people will think of at first are definitely: how to fix an external hard drive and how to recover data from external hard drive. Considering that the fixing measures may bring secondary damage to data still kept on the external drive, I prefer to talk about external hard drive data recovery first in this part.

3 Steps to Recover Data from An External Hard Drive

Typical data recovery methods don’t work when your external hard drive not working. Using professional data recovery software can be an effortless approach to getting data out of the problematic external hard drive. Among numerous data recovery tools, MiniTool Power Data Recovery is highly recommended due to its secure data recovery environment and robust file restoration features. Here is a detailed guide to recovering data from an external hard drive that doesn’t work properly.

Step 1: Get MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free on your computer by clicking the download button below. You should connect the external hard drive to your computer, and then launch the software. All detected partitions and devices will be listed in the main interface.

Choose the target partition to scan. Alternatively, you can change to the Devices tab to scan the external hard drive directly. However, the latter option requires a longer scan time.

Step 2: Wait patiently until the scan process is completed itself. You can browse the files during the scan process but do not interrupt the process for the best scan outcomes.

On the result page, you are suggested to shift to the Type tab to check files by their types and, more specifically, by file formats. To narrow down the file list, you can click the Filter button to set the filter conditions. When you need to find a certain file, you can type its file name (both the complete and the partial name are OK) into the search box and press Enter to locate it.

Step 3: To enhance the data recovery accuracy, you can use the Preview feature before saving the file. Double-clicking on the file or selecting it and clicking the Preview button allows you to verify the file content.

After finding the required files, you can tick the boxes in front of the required files and click Save to choose a new destination. Remember that the restoration path should be different from the original one to avoid data overwriting.

MiniTool Power Data Recovery has developed several editions to meet diverse technique requirements. You can visit this page to learn the differences among those editions. The free edition provides only 1GB of data recovery capacity.

Considering the amount of data stored on the external hard drive, you are advised to choose the Personal Ultimate edition to recover unlimited data and always update for free.

This is the end of this part.

Fix External Hard Disk Not Working Error

Even though the external hard drive not turning on seems to be a terrible problem, it may be fixed through proper means. I mainly want to share with you how to get your external hard drive to work in this part.

Troubleshoot External Hard Drive Not Recognized

• Assign a drive letter to an external hard drive or change a drive letter for it.
• Initialize the external hard drive & create partitions on it.
• Make a hidden external hard drive appear by changing properties or other ways.
• Reinstall or update the USB driver to the latest version.
• Conquer insufficient power supply on external hard drive.
• Try a different USB port/cable or connect the external drive to another computer.
• Repair the system’s built-in drivers by “System Restore“.
• Set parameters in CMOS to enable USB drive.
• Use a powerful anti-virus program to kill viruses on the drive.
• Install the latest chipset drivers of the motherboard.

Fix External Hard Drive Not Accessible

• Re-partitioning the external hard drive.
• Reformat the inaccessible partition on the external hard drive with Disk Management.
• Delete the inaccessible partitions after data recovery and then create new partitions.
• Use third-party software to check and fix not accessible external hard drive.
• Take ownership of the external hard drive in the way you prefer to.
• Run the CHKDSK command on the inaccessible external hard drive.
• Run the Error Checking tool in Windows to settle down access denied error.

Repair Dead External Hard Drive

If the external hard drive is only damaged logically, you may use the same ways mentioned above to repair the dead external drive. But, if it is damaged physically, you have to try these measures.

• Check the failed component of the dead external hard drive and then replace it with a new one.
• Reset the external hard drive to factory settings.
• Low-format the external hard drive.
• Buy a brand new external hard drive

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Sum-up

According to the study, the external hard drive not working issue can be divided into 4 different situations. The causes of and the solutions to these situations are not the same. Therefore, if you really find your external hard drive stopped working someday, you should figure out which situation you’re confronted with currently. Then, follow the steps mentioned in this article to recover data from the external hard drive. Finally, choose the appropriate methods to try to fix the external hard drive yourself.

If you have any problem with using the MiniTool software, please let us know via [email protected].