External Usb Hard Drive Not Detected

This video shows how to fix external hard drive not detected in Windows 10 due to no drive letter. To buy genuine Windows License keys, visit: - Windows. Unlike case 1, USB or external hard drive sometimes is invisible in File Explorer or Disk Management, but it can be detected in Device Manager, for example, an external HDD won't show up in explorer, but it shows in Device Manager. To fix the issue, several methods can be listed below. Make sure the USB or external hard drive is available.

1. External Hard Drive Not Detected As Usb
2. External Usb Hard Drive Not Detected

This article provides you with 100% working methods to fix 'external hard drive not working/responding error' without losing any data. If your external hard drive is not working, fails to respond or becomes undetectable, download EaseUS disk data recovery software here with 100% working methods to repair your not working external hard drive in Windows 10/8/7 PC and restore data now.

An external hard drive is a device that used to back up your most important files and data, but if it suddenly stops working or responding, don't worry. On this page, we'll focus on the external hard drive not working issue and you'll learn：

Applies to: Fix external hard drive, USB drive, SD card, internal HDD/SSD, etc., not working or responding error on Windows PC.

Quick Guide - Fix External Hard Drive Not Working/Responding Error in 3 Parts:

No matter what brands of devices you are using such as WD Elements external hard drive, Seagate external hard drive, SanDisk or Toshiba hard disks, etc, just follow this article to get your problem solved with the provided methods here now.

Causes of External Hard Drive Not Working/Responding

Is your external hard drive suddenly not working for no reason? Is your external hard drive suddenly cannot be detected or recognized by your PC or laptop? Relax!

You don't have to buy a new external hard drive and give up all the precious data. First, check the causes that make your external hard drive not working:

• Problematic connection
• RAW, invalid or unsupported file system
• Drive letter conflict or no drive letter
• No partition
• Not initialized
• Outdated disk driver
• USB Root Hub is outdated
• Disk is physically damaged
• ..

Don't worry if you don't know what exactly causes your external hard drive not working. Continue reading, we've collected 100% working fixes here to help you fix the external hard drive to work normally again without losing any data.

Part 1. Make Not Working External Hard Drive Detectable

Applies to: Fix external hard drive not showing, not detected error due to connection problem.

Mostly, when your external hard drive suddenly doesn't work or fails to show up on your computer, you should first check the device connection between your external disk and your computer.

Now, follow to make the not working external hard drive detectable and show up on your PC again:

#1. Check and Change External Hard Drive Connection Cable

The first thing that you should do is to check the external hard drive USB connection cable:

• If the connection cable is loosened, reconnect external disk to PC and tight it.
• Is the external USB connection cable broken or damaged, switch a new cable, and reconnect the disk to PC.

#2. Change a USB Port or Connect to a New Computer

If the USB connection cable is not broken, try to reconnect the external drive to your PC via a new USB port and check if the computer detects your disk.

If still nothing shows up, change a computer and reconnect the external drive.

#3. Check Power Management for USB Hub

If it doesn't work after changing the USB port or cannot be read by a new PC, try the quick fix below to repair an unrecognizable external hard drive:

Step 1. In Run (Windows + R), type devmgmt.msc and hit Enter.

Step 2. Open Device Manager > expand 'Universal Serial Bus controllers'.

Step 3. Right-click USB Root Hub > Properties > Power Management > uncheck 'Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power'.

After following the above 3 tips, your computer should be able to detect and recognize your external hard drive now. You can try to open the drive and access the data.

If you still cannot access the data, don't worry. Move to Part 2 and we'll offer you the best hard disk data recovery software to help you quickly access and restore all valuable data on immediately.

Part 2. Recover Data Before Fixing External Hard Drive With Not Working Error

Telecharger microsoft store windows 10. After making the external hard drive detectable, we suggest you recover data from the drive first as some measures may bring secondary damage to your data on the disk. After this, we'll offer you some reliable methods to fix the external hard drive in the next part.

3 Steps to Recover Data from External Hard Drive

To recover data from your external disk, you'll need reliable HDD recovery software for help.

EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard with its powerful capacity allows you to scan and recover data from the external hard drive which is not working properly in only 3 steps.

See how to restore data from the external hard drive on your own:

Step 1. Choose the external hard drive

Since you're going to recover data from the external hard drive, run EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard and choose the exact drive where you lost data. Click Scan.

Step 2. Scan for lost data

The software will start immediately to scan all over the selected drive for all lost data. During the scan, you could see more and more data showing up in the results.

Step 3. Preview and recover data

After the scan is over, check the scan results for the desired data. You can preview the file by double-clicking on it. Click Recover and choose another location to save the recovered data.

Don't save the recovered data on your external hard drive before fixing and making it work normally again.

Part 3. How to Fix 'External Hard Drive Is Not Working/Responding' Error

Let's see how to repair the not responding external hard drive or undetectable external hard disk drive now.

To help you find the right fix for the 'external hard drive not working' error in Windows 10/8/7, please open Disk Management and check the state of your external hard drive:

1. #1. Check and Fix Disk Errors on External Hard Drive - Disk Contains Corrupted File System Error
2. #2. Format External Hard Drive to NTFS - Disk Shows RAW or Unsupported File System
3. #3. Create A New Partition in External Hard Drive - Disk Displays as Unallocated
4. #4. Assign a New Drive Letter to External Disk - Disk Shows as 'New Volume' with No Drive Letter
5. #5. Initialize External Disk and Create a New Volume - Disk Is Unknown, Not Initialized

Method 1 to Method 7 can fix most external hard disk not working issue, and if none of them work, turn to Method 8 and Method 9 for help. Let's start the external hard disk repair process.

Method 1. Check and Fix Disk Errors on External Hard Drive

Applies to: Fix external hard drive not working due to unknown disk error or corrupted file system.

Mostly, when an internal or external hard drive contains an unknown error or corrupted file system, the Windows computer will not be able to detect or open the drive.

Here you have two options to check up the disk and fix internal errors on a not responding external hard drive:

Option 1. Run Partition Manager Freeware to Fix External Hard Drive Not Responding Error

Download and install EaseUS Partition Master Free on your PC.

Step 1. Open EaseUS Partition Master on your computer. Then locate the disk, right-click the partition you want to check, and choose 'Check File System'.

Step 2. In the Check File System window, keep the 'Try to fix errors if found' option selected and click 'Start'.

Step 3. The software will begin checking your partition file system on your disk. When it has completed, click 'Finish'.

Option 2. Run CMD to Manually Fix External Hard Drive Errors

Step 1. Type cmd in the Search box, right-click to open Command Prompt.

Step 2. Type diskpart and hit Enter.

Step 3. Type chkdsk /f /r /x g: and hit Enter to let the checking process to run.

Replace g with the drive letter of your external hard drive.

Step 4. When it's finished, type: exit and hit Enter to finish the process.

After this, your not responding external hard drive should now show up. If it still doesn't work, go on with an easier chkdsk alternative.

Option 3. Run CMD Alternative to Fix External Disk File System Error

The Command line is suitable for computer professionals since wrong commands can cause severe problems. Therefore, we strongly recommend you try EaseUS Tools M.

It is a practical computer fixing tool that is safe and light-weighted. To fix file system error or disk error:

If you don't have any technical know-how and want to minimize data risks, using third-party software could be a better choice. The Command line is suitable for computer professionals since wrong commands can cause severe problems. Therefore, we strongly recommend you try an automatic command line alternative.

EaseUS Tools M is a practical computer fixing tool that is safe and light-weighted. It's a perfect alternative to CHKDSK command. Use this one-click tool to solve your computer issues.

To fix file system error or disk error:

Step 1: DOWNLOAD EaseUS Tools M for Free and install it.

Step 2: Open the software and select the 'File showing' option.

Step 3: Choose the drive and wait for repairing. After the operation completes, click the 'View' button to check the drive.

Method 2. Format External Hard Drive to NTFS to Repair Not Working External Disk

Applies to: Fix external hard drive not working, detecting or responding error due to RAW or unsupported file system.

If your external or internal hard disk shows as a RAW or unsupported file system in Disk Management, the best way is to format the disk to a recognized format.

In order to make sure that the external hard drive is secure for storing new data again, you can format it to repair the not working drive to be usable again with Windows disk management:

Step 1. In Run (Windows + R), type diskmgmt.msc and hit Enter.

Step 2. Go to Disk Management, right-click the external hard drive, and select 'Format'.

Step 3. Choose a file system like NTFS or exFAT and tick 'Quick format'. Click 'OK' to start the formatting.

After this, your external hard drive is viable for saving data again.

Method 3. Create A New Partition in External Hard Drive

Applies to: Fix disk displays as unallocated in Disk Management that make external hard drive not working.

Mostly, when your external hard disk shows as unallocated, it means that there is no partition in the disk. As a result, the computer cannot recognize it. To fix this issue, you need to first recover data from the disk first (as shown in Part 2).

Then, you can follow the steps below to create a new partition, making the external hard drive working again:

Step 1. Connect the unallocated external hard drive to your PC and open Disk Management.

Step 2. Right-click on the unallocated space of the external hard drive, select 'New Simple Volume'.

Step 3. Set partition size, drive letter and file system (NTFS), etc.

Step 4. Click 'Finish' to complete the process.

Method 4. Assign a New Drive Letter to External Disk

Applies to: Fix disk shows as 'New Volume' with no drive letter that causes external hard drive not responding.

Step 1. Go to Disk Management and right-click on your external hard drive.

Step 2. Go and select a new drive letter by clicking 'Change', and click 'OK' to confirm.

Then not responding external hard drive can be read and detected now.

Method 5. Initialize External Disk and Create a New Volume

Applies to: Fix 'Disk Is Unknown, Not Initialized' that cause external hard disk not working nor showing up.

Macos hard drive. Step 1. Right-click 'My Computer' > 'Manage' to run Disk Management.

Step 2. Here, right-click the Unknow external hard drive and click 'Initialize Disk'.

Step 3. Select the disk(s) to initialize and choose MBR or GPT partition style, and click 'OK' to confirm.

Now the drive is recognized as unallocated and if you have vital data saved there, revert to Part 1 and apply EaseUS data recovery software for help.

Step 4. Then right-click on the unallocated space on your external hard drive and create a new volume on it.

Method 6. Update Disk Driver

Applies to: Force not responding external hard drive to show up and work by updating disk drivers.

Step 1. Right-click 'This PC' and choose 'Manage'.

Step 2. Click 'Device Manager' then expand 'Disk drives'.

Step 3. Find and right-click the problematic external drive and select 'Update driver'.

Step 4. Click 'automatically search for driver software online'.

Method 7. Uninstall Universal Bus Controllers

External Hard Drive Not Detected As Usb

Applies to: Fix external hard drive not working issue by updating Universal Serial Bus controllers drivers.

Step 1. Open 'Device Manager', find and expand Universal Serial Bus controllers

Step 2. Right-click on the USB controllers of your external drive and select 'Uninstall device'.

Step 3. Repeat to uninstall each USB controller one by one. Then restart the computer.

While rebooting PC, Microsoft will automatically reinstall the USB controllers software for your not working external hard drive.

Method 8. Run Antivirus Software

Applies to: Fix virus or malware that causes your external hard drive not working.

Sometimes, viruses or malware infections may also cause your device to malfunctioning. So it is to your external hard drive. When you tried all the above fixes, but the drive is still not working, you can try to run antivirus software to unlock the drive:

Step 1. Install and run antivirus software on your computer.

Step 2. Scan and unlock the external hard drive.

Step 3. Wait for the cleaning process to complete and restart PC.

After this, reconnect your external hard drive to the computer and check if you can use it again.

Method 9. Turn to External Hard Drive Manufacturer or Repair Center for Help

The last option that you can try is to contact your external hard drive producer or a local disk repair center for help. It could be the outdated firmware or disk driver that is outdated. For this issue, your disk support team can resolve and make your disk work again.

As for external hard disk data recovery, a local disk repair center or manual data recovery service can do. Here you may also try EaseUS Data Recovery Service.

To Sum Up

On this page, we explained the causes of external hard drive not working, not responding, and not detectable error. To make things easy for you, we divided the whole process into 3 parts:

Part 1. Make external hard drive detectable; Part 2. Recover data from the external hard drive; Part 3. Fix not working external hard drive with respective solutions.

The methods offered in this article can also be applied to repair and fix SD cards, memory cards, USB drives, flash drives, or hard drive partitions, etc devices with not responding/working or undetectable issues.

It's recommended that you should create an extra backup of your files to another secure location, like Cloud drive. When you lost data on your disk, always remember to let EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard help.

Summary: Internal hard disk or external hard disk detected/recognized but not accessible/opening on Windows computer? No worries! You can turn to this complete guide to learn how to repair your internal external hard drive or external hard drive and recover your data as well.

Nowadays, external hard drives are inexpensive, but they offer outstanding performance, fast speed and light weight. There are different brands of external hard drives, such as Seagate, WD, Toshiba and Lacie. All of them often offer advanced features to protect your data, save and share files between different platforms more flexible.

However, you may get into troubles in opening external hard drives on your Widnows computer. So, it's important to know how to use it in the right way.

What is an external hard drive and how to use it?

An external hard drive is a portable storage device that can be attached to a computer on the outside rather than on the inside. It should be essential when you want to quickly and easily expand the storage space of your computer as well as back up your important music, photos and files.

Almost all the external hard drives are plug-and-play. To use an external hard drive, you can just plug it in the computer USB port. You will need an adapter if your computer has a USB-C port. Normally, Windows will automatically shows the drive in File Explore.

But sometimes because of faulty cable, damaged USB port, incorrect file system, driver issues, etc., the drive keeps blinking but it can't be showing up or opening in Windows Explore. The following is a query from a forum:

I have an 80GB Seagate external hard drive that I connect to my Windows computer to store files but for some reason, just recently, it has stopped showing up in the 'My Computer' folder. It shows up as a device in device manager but I don't know how to open it. Why is my external hard drive detected but cannot open?

Actually, this issue is more common than external hard disk like SSD not detected on Windows or Mac. Now, try these workarounds in this article to fix the external hard disk detected but not accessible/opening issue without losing data.

Fix external hard disk detected but not accessible/opening issue?

To fix this issue, you may try more than one solutions. Let's take a look at how to diagnose undetected external hard drives in Windows.

Solution 1:Make sure your external hard drive is power on

The first and obvious step is to check whether the external hard drive is spinning or not. If it does, the power supply is not an issue at hand. Otherwise, the drive doesn't have enough power to function. In this situation, you can try plugging it into another outlet or swapping the cable if possible. If you've plugged the drive into a USB hub, try connecting it directly to your PC.

Solution 2:Try another USB port

The problem may lie in the USB port you're using to connect the external hard drive to your computer. To check this issue, you can unplug the drive from its current USB port and try plugging it into another port on your computer. If the drive works as normal in a different USB port, you may have a dead USB port.

Solution 3:Restart your Windows computer

Whenever you face with frozen screens, crashing programs or inaccessible removable disks, you can save anything you are working on and restart your computer before you freak out.

A simple restart can flush out all RAM (Random Access Memory), stop outdated or glitch programs, etc. Safely remove the external hard drive from your computer. Click the Windows icon or 'Start' in the bottom left corner. Locate the Power icon and select 'Restart'.

Solution 4:Plug the drive to a Mac computer

If you connect a Mac-formatted drive to your Windows computer, you'll be informed that 'You need to formatted the disk in drive *: before you can use it' This error message appears because Windows doesn't understand Apple file system, including HFS+ and the latest APFS.

To make sure of this, you can plug the drive to a Mac computer to see if it can be used without problem.

If you can see it showing up in Finder and delete files on the drive, you can make sure the drive is formatted for macOS. That's fine, you should back up your important data on another storage device and then reformat it to exFAT or FAT32 on Mac.

Alternatively, you can use third-party software to read mac formatted drive on Windows. If the external hard drive still cannot be readable on Mac, go on the following solutions.

Solution 5:Troubleshoot driver issues

While you're having a problem with your hardware, you should associate with outdated drivers. Although Windows 10 automatically handle driver updates, but it isn't perfect. Sometimes, it will leave some essential driver updates behind.

So you should keep an eye on any security updates and different driver versions that pop up. If you missed the pop-ups or ignored them, it's not a big deal. You can update drivers in Device Manager.

In the search box on the task bar, enter 'device manager' and then select 'Device Manager'. Double-click 'Disk drives' to expand the category. If you see any devices with yellow exclamation point next to them, that device has a driver problem.

You need to right-click the device with the issue, select 'Update driver software' and click 'Automatically search for drive software online..'. When the update progress finishes, reboot your computer and then reconnect the external hard drive to your PC to see whether it can be accessed.

Solution 6:Check if the external hard drive is not showing up in Disk Management

The next thing is to check whether Windows detects the hard disk.

Plug your external hard drive if it isn't already. Right-click the Start button on the desktop to open Quick Access Menu and then choose 'Disk Management'.

You can also open the Run dialog with Windows key + X and enter diskmgmt.msc to open the Disk Management which is a tool to initialize and reformat external hard drives in Windows.

In the Disk Management window, you will see all the hard disks connected to your Windows computer, along with their size, partitions and other disk information. You should see your external hard drive listed in the window, even if it has no drive letter or displays as unallocated, unknown, not initialized, offline. Let's see how to fix these 4 cases:

Note: If the external hard disk not showing up in Disk Management, unfortunately, the drive might have been physically damaged and can't be recognized by Windows operating system. If so, you can only send it to a local repair center or replace it with a new one.

Case 1: If the drive is unallocated in Disk Management, create a new volume

• 1. Right-click on the unallocated space and choose 'New Simple Volume'.
• 2. In the 'New Simple Volume Wizard', select 'Next'.
• 3. Enter the volume size and click 'Next'.
• 4. Give the new volume a letter or path. You can select from the drop down menu and click 'Next'.
• 5. Choose whether you want to format the partition. If you want use the partition, you must tick 'Format this volume with the following settings'.
• 6. Complete the setting for the new volume, including File System, size and volume label.
• 7. Select 'Perform a quick format' and click on the 'Next' button.

Case 2: If the drive has no drive letter, change the drive letter and paths

• 1. Right-click the external hard drive and choose 'Change Drive Letter and Paths' from the context menu.
• 2. If the device doesn't have a drive letter, you should click on the 'Add' button in the pop-up window and choose one. If the device has a drive letter, click 'Change' and try another one.
• 3. Click 'OK' to confirm.
• 4. Give the new volume a letter or path. You can select from the drop down menu and click 'Next'.
• 5. Choose whether you want to format the partition. If you want use the partition, you must tick 'Format this volume with the following settings'.
• 6. Complete the setting for the new volume, including file system, size and volume label.
• 7. Select 'Perform a quick format' and click on the 'Next' button.

Case 3: If the drive is unknown or not initialized, initialise it.

• 1. Right-click on the unknown, not initialized disk and choose 'Initialise Disk' from the context menu.
• 2. Select a partition style from MBR and GPT.
• 3. Click 'OK' and wait for the operation to complete.

Case 4: If the drive is offline, set online.

• 1. Right-click on the offline disk.
• 2. Choose 'Online' from the pop-up menu.

Important:How to recover lost data from external hard drives?

If you have tried the solutions above, all your data stored on the external hard drive is erased. If you didn't back up important data, you may wonder how to get lost data back. Read the following tutorial.

You can also watch this short video tutorial to perform external hard drive data recovery:

It's high recommended to use iBoysoft Data Recovery, a free external hard drive data recovery software. It is able to recover lost data from external hard drives in various situations, such asexternal hard drive inaccessible, corrupted, unreadable, formatted/not formatted,unallocated, RAW, etc.

Besides, it also recovers data from corrupted USB drives, Pen drives, SD cards, memory cards, CF cards and much more external storage devices on Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP and Windows Server 2019/2016/2012/2008/2003.

• 1. Free download iBoysoft Data Recovery and install it.
• 2. Connect the external hard drive to your Mac computer and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery.
• 3. Choose the inaccessible external hard drive and click 'Next' to start scanning for all lost files.
• 4. When the scanning process finished, the search results will be displayed on the interface. You are able to double-click the files to preview. Then select files you want to get back and click 'Recover'.
• 5. Go over the recovered files to make sure all the lost files have been successfully recovered.

Note: If you fails to find the desired files, you can click on the 'Back' button, select the drive again and then tick 'Deep scan' at the bottom. This operation will scan the drive sector by sector.

Solution 7:Run Windows Troubleshooter

Windows Troubleshooter is a small tool to quickly diagnose and automatically fix common computer problems with devices and hardware, such as network and printer connectivity, Windows update, Bluetooth and a lot more. Here is how to run Troubleshooter on Windows 10:

• 1. Go to Start > Settings and choose 'Update and Security' from Windows Settings panel.
• 2. Go to the Troubleshoot tab and scroll down to choose 'Hardware and Device' from the right panel.
• 3. Click 'Run the Troubleshooter'.
• 4. Once the scan finishes, you need to choose the issue you want to fix and click 'Next'.

Solution 8:Run CHKDSK to repair the inaccessible external hard drive

CHKDSK is a non-destructive utility to fix disk errors such as bad sectors, file table corruption, etc. You can try to repair the corrupted external hard disk without worrying about data loss.

• 1. Type 'cmd' into the search box from Start. From the search results, right-click on Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator.
• 2. Enter 'chkdsk *: /r ' in the pop-up window and press 'Enter'. For example, if the not accessible/opening drive is disk H, enter 'chkdsk h: /r'
• 3. Reboot your computer and see whether the external hard drive is showing up in This PC/My Computer and can open.

Solution 9: Reformat the external hard drive

If you have tried all these solutions above, but you still cannot access the external hard drive. The last attempt is to reformat the drive. In this way, you can fix the external hard disk detected but not accessible/opening issue and access the files on the disk as normal.

• 1. Go to Disk Management.
• 2. Right-click on the external hard disk and select 'Format'.
• 3. Setup the required information and click Start. The process will finish in minutes.

External Usb Hard Drive Not Detected

Additionally, if the external hard disk is physically dead, you need torecover lost data from the dead external hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery and then send it to an expert.