Files not showing in external hard drive? Are your files really lost? How can you recover files from the external hard drive? This post shows you solutions in different situations and introduces data recovery software for you when files are lost by accident.

Problem – Files Not Showing in External Hard Drive

Although an external hard drive has brought us great convenience in daily life and work, there are chances when we open an external hard drive and find nothing in it or some files are missing. However, the disk properties prove that a section of disk capacity is taken by something.

files not showing in external hard drive

If we still have a general impression of how much space our data occupies in the external hard drive, we can almost tell these things are the files we stored in the external hard drive.

Sometimes, we find files not showing in external hard drive and then get anxious, being afraid of losing important files forever. What’s really happening when such a problem occurs? Can we fix it or rescue missing data here?

We’ll answer those questions for you. Now, let’s start with rescuing files missing from external hard drive with MiniTool Power Data Recovery – a piece of wonderful but free file recovery software. When data recovery is done, we’ll explain the possible causes and solutions for the files not showing problem.

Recover Data from External Hard Drive

When you finally discover some files are missing from external hard drive or even a partition in it is damaged/lost, you must conduct data recovery on the external hard drive right away.

In this case, please stop writing any new data into the external hard drive and then follow the operations we’ll mention in the next part to recover data with MiniTool Power Data Recovery easily. Believe it or not, this software will light the hope of data recovery as long as the external hard drive is not physically damaged.

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Please read Recover Files From Dead External Hard Drive With Actionable Way carefully if your external hard drive becomes dead/corrupted unluckily.

3 Steps to Recover Data from External Hard Drive

Step 1: Get this software on your computer. After successfully installation, you need to connect the external hard drive to your computer and then launch the software. Ensure that the external hard drive is recognized by your computer.

Choose the target partition where the lost files are stored on your external hard drive and click Scan. Alternatively, you can choose the specific folder to scan by clicking Select Folder at the bottom section and navigating to select the target folder.

scan the target partition

Step 2: The scan process might take a few minutes. You can browse the file list during scanning but do not interrupt the scan process in order to find all lost files.

Generally, files are divided into three folders according to their paths: Deleted Files, Lost Files, and Existing Files. You can expand the former two folders to find the wanted files or use the Type, Filter, and Search features to locate files more quickly.

find files

Step 3: After finding files, you can double-click to preview them. This software supports previewing documents, pictures, videos, audio, and other files less than 2GB.

Select the wanted files and click Save to choose a destination different from the original path.

save files

Remember that MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free can only retrieve 1GB of files for free. If you choose files larger than 1GB, you should update to a premium edition to complete the data recovery process.

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After successfully recovering data from the external hard drive, you can keep reading to fix the current drive with the following methods.

Why Can’t See Files in External Hard Drive & How to Solve

Files missing from external hard drive has become a frequently discussed issue in many forums. So there must be some ideas that catch the point. Based on this, we decided to make a list of the possible reasons and useful suggestions for users to refer to. Here, we have summarized 4 main causes as well as the solutions for you.

4 Causes That Can Be Fixed Directly in Windows

Possible cause 1 – the files are hidden: sometimes, the files are not really missing from the external hard drive. They’re just hidden, not showing to us. And here are 4 solutions to unhide them.

>>1. Run Command Prompt as administrator. Input DIR/A X:-s (X refers to the drive letter of our external hard drive) and hit Enter. The meaning of this command is to list the non-system files in X: drive.

If this command returns nothing, it means our folder has been marked as protected system files, and then we can refer to the second solution.

run the DIR/A command

>>2. Check whether the files are endowed with system property. Open the Control Panel and select Appearance and Personalization > File Explorer Options. Change to the View tab in the prompt window, then you should tick Show hidden files, folders, and drives and unselect Hide protected operating system files (Recommended) to show all the files. Click Apply > OK to save the changes.

change File Explorer Options
Tips:
If the checkbox is not optional, we can run Command Prompt, and input attrib -H -S X:\folder name /s /d (X: means the specific drive letter of the external hard drive and can be replaced by D:, E:, F: etc.). Then press Enter to make it optional. Please pay attention to the space between the commands.

>>3. If our files keep missing from the external hard d drive, run Command Prompt as administrator. Then, enter this command: attrib -h -r -s /s /d X:*.* (replace X with the actual drive letter of your external hard drive) and hit Enter to execute it. Finally, check if our real files will be shown.

run the Attrib command line

>>4. If all solutions above fail, try the following process which is the most complex:

  1. Run Command Prompt as administrator.
  2. Type the drive letter of the external hard drive.
  3. Type dir /ah and hit Enter. We will now see the files/folders with hidden attributes.
  4. Type attrib [name of file/folder] -r -a -s -h and hit Enter. Please note that the file name should include the file extension, such as sample2.nrw. If the folder name has more than 6 characters, type the first 6 characters followed by ~1, such as birthd~1.
unhide the file with command lines

Finally, check our external hard drives, all data should be there.

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Possible cause 2 – file system errors: in some cases, the files may be not showing in an external hard drive because the file system is corrupted or because it doesn’t contain a recognized file system. At this time, users had better recover data from external hard drive with the above guide first.

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Afterward, use the Error-checking utility to detect the file system error: right-click on the partition and choose Properties. Change to the Tools tab and click Check in the Error-checking section.

check disk file system errors

Possible cause 3 – “CheckedValue” is suffering from virus infection.

Here’s how to fix it:

Step 1: Open Windows Registry Editor on your computer and navigate with the following path:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\Folder\Hidden\SHOWAL.

Step 2: Locate the CheckedValue registry on the right pane. Double-click on it to check whether the data value of it is 1. If not, change the number to 1 and click OK to save the change. 

change the registry value

Possible cause 4 – the mirror image in memory is damaged: sometimes the mirror image in memory is damaged and the operating system does not respond to a timely refresh, which happens by chance.

In this case, you can restart the computer and then reconnect the external hard drive to check if the real files are shown.

That’s all for the solutions. In fact, each solution has helped many users get rid of the files not showing in external hard drive problem, and we also hope they are helpful for you.

2 Cases for Missing Files from External Hard Drive

But what’s the real story? How exactly did they disappear? Such kinds of questions are all over the internet. The following mentioned examples are just a drop in the bucket.

"I have a problem with my external hard disk. I saved some school documents on my drive. When I got to the school computer to copy my homework, then I noticed all my folders went missing, except ones that were not in a folder. I still have my used memory, but can't see my folders. Please help me!" MakeUseOf
"Hey guys I have a problem with my external hard drive ... 2 days ago I bought a new laptop and when I plugged my hard drive into it to install some games I found that it didn't contain anything except 2 files. Also, it shows 900 GB of used space and this means that my old files are still there. So please help me return them back because I need them. By the way, I've tried showing hidden folders and everything in folder options."Tomshardware

Faced with such confusion, most users behave like ants on hot bricks, while some users skillfully find that if they try to type the path or address of a specific folder, it opens. However, typically we have stored large numbers of files and folders in the external hard drive and we cannot remember all names of folders…So any better idea?

At this time, you are suggested to adopt MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free Edition to finish data recovery by using methods introduced in If This Can’t Help You with Free USB Data Recovery, Nothing Will.

Learn More about External Hard Drive

Different from an internal hard drive, an external hard drive is a portable storage device that can be attached to a computer via USB, eSATA, or Firewire. External hard drives typically have high storage capacities and are often used to back up computers.

Having our videos, pictures, and other large files copied to an external hard drive is a safe way to back up things. Besides, the external hard drive is always acting as a data transmission medium, thus we don’t have to carry computers with us everywhere.

External Hard Drive Becomes a Necessity in Modern Life

External hard drive enjoys many advantages when compared to other storage devices, so they are getting more and more closely to our daily lives. Today we are accustomed to bringing an external hard drive with us in case of data transmission, such as to deal with working paper between the office and home.

By using an external hard drive, we avoid the network requirement, the uploading and downloading process, and time. But, if our families share one computer with us at home, there will be a big risk of data loss. So backing up important data to external hard drive becomes a wise choice.

During the process of using external hard drives, we will inevitably encounter some difficulties, “external hard drive not shown in My Computer” and “files not shown in external hard drive“. So in this post, we are going to talk about the second issue: why we can’t see files in external hard drive. And we’ll explain how to show those missing files in external hard drive beyond all doubt.

Characteristics That Makes External Hard Drive Popular

External hard drives usually have the following advantages in common:

  • Small volume: an external hard drive is usually several inches in size, such as 2.5 inches, or 3.5 inches in common.
  • Large capacity: external hard drives always adopt large capacity and the unit is always Terabyte.
  • High speed: an external hard drive connected via Firewire usually works at high speed, which makes it rather easy to transfer data between the computer and external hard drives.
  • Portability: since the external hard drive has a small volume, it is available to carry them everywhere.
  • Ease of use: an external hard drive is very easy to handle. It can be applied in both Windows & Mac and will be automatically detected in a few seconds. Then users can use it like an internal hard drive.
  • Lower cost per GB: the price of an external hard drive is getting lower and lower due to proven techniques. Normally we only spend several cents per GB on an external hard drive. For example, WD Black 6TB costs around $300, which is approximately equal to 5 cents per GB – much cheaper than a USB flash drive.

Bottom Line

We have noticed that files not showing in external hard drive are a frequently asked question in many forums. Therefore, in this post, we have summarized almost all feasible solutions for users who have headaches with this issue to refer to.

Remember, external hard drives today have become an indispensable medium for us to deal with data backup, privacy protection, data transmission, and so on, so we need to pay more attention to the operations we have made during usage to avoid unnecessary trouble.

What’s more? Once something unlucky happens and leads to serious data loss, we should stop all operations and turn to reliable solutions quickly, so as to ensure the largest possibility for data recovery.

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