Q&A: Why Can’t My Computer Detect External Hard Drive? – Solution for External Drive Problem

Question: Why Isn’t External Hard Drive Detected on My Computer?

User1: I have a 500GB WD external hard drive which can’t be detected by my Toshiba laptop. Is there any way to find the external hard drive and reformat the drive? I neither want to lose the data from the external hard drive nor do I want to change a new external hard drive.

User2: I just plugged my external hard drive to my computer and Windows says that it recognizes the device and is ready to use. However, when I want to open the external hard drive under My Computer, I can’t see a new drive icon. It seems like that the external harddrive is not recognized by my computer. How can I access the external hard drive to read the data inside?

User3: I am unable to access my external hard drive because it is not showing up on My Computer. I can see the external hard drive shown as a portable device under Disk Management but I have no way to access the drive. I need help to solve this problem please. 

Answer: Possible Methods to Fix the Problem & Retrieve Data

Have you tried to connect it to another computer if your external hard can’t be detected on your computer? Have you tried to plug the external hard drive to a different USB port? If you have done these things but got no result, have you check it under Disk Management if the external hard drive has a drive letter? You can try to assign a new different drive letter to the external hard drive under Disk Management to make it visible on My Computer. If you have important data inside the external hard drive, you must restore data first before you can do anything to the drive. In order to recover data from the external hard drive, you can use external drive recovery software. You can free download the software and follow the data recovery instructions to perform a data recovery free.

Download the Following Software to Recover Data

	The first must try recovery software is a freeware to recover files from all types of memory card, so you can refer to free card recovery tutorials if you want to recover memory card data.	First must try recovery software
	The second must try recovery software is also a freeware which can recover photos, videos, music, etc from memory card, USB drive, hard drive, external drive, etc. Please refer to best data recovery software for step by step guide.	Second must try recovery software
	The third must try recovery software is available for free download, with which you can recover any type of file from all storage devices. You can visit  recommended data recovery to learn detailed steps.	Third must try recovery software

The data recovery software also enables you to recover files from unrecognized SD card, restore corrupted CF card data, etc.

Features of External Drive Recovery Software

• It allows you to recover any type of files including photos, videos, music, audio files, etc
• The software supports all brands of external hard drives such as Toshiba, Western Digital, Seagate, Samsung, Maxtor, etc
• You can free download the software
• The software is easy to handle, so everybody can use it to recover files

References

Photo recovery

Android photo recovery

TF card format recovery for free

TF card recovery

External hard drive raw to ntfs