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This tip is about the how To Fix ‘External Drive Not Showing Up Or Recognized’ Issue. So read this free guide, How To Fix ‘External Drive Not Showing Up Or Recognized’ Issue step by step. If you have query related to same article you may contact us.
How To Fix ‘External Drive Not Showing Up Or Recognized’ Issue – Guide
Removable storage media – such as thumb drives, SD cards and external hard drives – should be easy to use with your computer. But in some cases, you may connect your drive to a Windows PC or other device with a USB port and find that the external hard drive is not showing up. up. Sometimes our PC crashes or refuses to recognize external hard drive even after confirming successful connection. The problem mainly occurs when the device driver is corrupted or outdated. Then open the Disk Management tool. To do this, press Win + X (or right-click the Start button button) to open the Power User menu and select Disk Management from the list.
This problem has several possible causes: partition problems on the external drive, using the wrong file system, inactive USB ports, or Windows driver issues. At worst, the drive itself may be dead. This is a preliminary step, but it should be reviewed. Almost all flash drives and many external hard drives do not require a separate power supply – they are powered via USB. However, some external desktop drives have dedicated power cables or at least one physical power supply. button. You can also open the Run dialog box with Win + R and type diskmgmt.msc to open this utility.
How to fix external drive not showing Up or recognized
Well, there are many reasons behind why external drive not showing up in File Explorer. It could be due to partition issues, wrong file system, problematic USB ports, driver issues, write protection, etc.
Change the USB port
Well, this is one of the first things you need to do if you just found out that Windows is not detecting your external drive. USB cables or USB ports are prone to damage and it is possible that the external drive is not showing up or recognized due to a damaged USB port or cable. So make sure to connect the hard drive with a different USB cable. If the external drive still does not appear, try connecting the hard drive to a different USB port.
Check the Drive-In Disk Management Utility
Well, in this method users need to use Disk Management utility to check whether the drive is showing up or not. Follow some of the simple steps given below to fix the now displayed external drive up a problem.
Fix driver issues
Well if the external drive shows up on another computer but not yours, you need to fix the driver issues. To fix driver issues, press Windows key + X to open Power menu options. Now select Device Manager from the Power menu. In Device Manager, you need to expand the Drives category and look for the yellow exclamation point next to installed drives.
If any drivers show this icon then they have the driver problem. Just right-click and choose Properties. Select “Update Driver” in the properties. You can also try reversing the driver version, uninstalling the device, etc.
format the drive
Well, if the external drive appears in the Windows Disk Management utility but you still cannot access it, then most likely it is partitioned with the incompatible file system. In that case, you need to format your external drive with the older NTFS or FAT32 file system. To reformat a partition in the Windows Disk Management utility, select the external drive and right-click on it.
From the right click menu, you need to select ‘Format’. However, make sure you copy all important files because formatting will erase everything. In the Format menu, type the label Volume, select ‘FAT32’ as a file system, and set ‘Allocation Unit Size’ to ‘Default’. Make sure to check the ‘Perform a quick format’ option and then click ‘Ok’.
Final note
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