▷ What to do if windows does not recognize external hard drive

Let's see the possible solutions to the problem of Windows not recognizing external hard drive. If you are in this article it is because you have just bought a brand new external hard drive (or you already had one from before) and you are not able to interact with it to store or take files from it. This article is also applicable if Windows 10 does not recognize USB

Index of contents

External hard drives are a good tool for having portable storage units with large storage capacities. Basically it is almost always a mechanical hard disk inserted in a box with a USB interface so that it can be used externally and with the possibility of hot-plugging. Other models also implement their own software for managing backups or playback of their multimedia content.

In any case, these cost money and what we do not want is to find the unpleasant surprise that it does not work on our team.

Check that the disk appears in the system

The first thing we must identify is whether there is a connection between the hard drive and the system. If Windows 10 does not recognize USB or USB hard drive we will do practically the same actions. For this we are going to connect the unit in a USB port and we are going to see the following:

Sound on the disc or lights on the box

Perhaps this is a truism, but we must identify when connecting the external hard drive any light in the box or any sound from the mechanical components. In this way we will know that it is not a problem of the box itself or the connection.

Identify any system sounds

The first sign that Windows detects new hardware is due to the typical sound it makes when connecting something. Although of course, you may not have realized if it has sounded or not.

Device administrator

To know for sure that the system has recognized the hard drive, what we will have to do is go to the device manager to see if it is registered in the list.

• Right click on the Windows 10 start menu and a tool menu will appear. We must enter the option " Device Manager "

• A list of devices will appear. At the end of the whole, we can see "Disk drives" click to extend your list. Does the external hard disk appear here?

• It may appear with an exclamation mark. Let's right-click it and choose " Update Driver " to see if this sign is removed. If not, we will see what options we have later.

Solution 1: test on another computer or on another port

If through the above checks you have not been able to identify your hard drive on your computer, the most normal thing is to try connecting it to another USB or Firewire port to see if it works. If so, you know that that USB port is screwed.

If it still doesn't do anything, and Windows 10 doesn't recognize USB, try plugging it into another computer to see if you have the same error. If you see that the physical box of the disk does not light up or make any sound, surely the problem is with the hard disk itself. It's time to contact the manufacturer or warranty.

Although, if this is not your case, and the hard disk is recognized in the device manager, we will continue with other options.

Solution 2: Interference with the hard disk software

If the hard drive appears with an exclamation point, and before the problem occurred, the hard drive was working properly, you may have encountered problems when you installed the software that comes with your hard drive internally.

Some multimedia or external discs have internal software that can be installed to increase the functionalities of the hard drive. And the truth is that sometimes these programs give errors and Windows does not recognize the external hard drive.

If this is your case, try to uninstall this software again to see if the problem has been fixed.

Solution 3: is it a newly purchased hard drive?

If so, it is possible that this is still unformatted, as is the case with internal hard drives that are purchased for computers. What we should do is the following:

• We connect the hard drive to the computer We go to the start and right-click on it We choose the option " Disk management "

• Now we will see a tool for managing our storage units

To know how to use this tool we invite you to enter our tutorial:

Here you will see all its most interesting options.

If our hard drive is new it will not have a format, so the following window will surely appear:

• We must simply choose " Accept." If we look at the main window, we will see that this unit appears in black in its graph. We must right-click on it and choose " New simple volume "

• We will open a wizard to format the hard drive In one of the screens we will have to assign a letter to the drive. We can assign the one we really want.

• The next thing to do is format the hard drive. If it is large, it will be best to format it as NTFS. And if it is a USB flash drive, the recommended is FAT32.

• We put a name to the unit and click on " next ". Then we finished the wizard. Now the hard drive will appear in blue and it will be possible to use it.

Solution 4: corrupt or RAW formatted hard drive

This possibility is directly linked to the previous one. If we open the manager of hard disks and the portable storage unit with RAW format appears to us, it is for this reason that we have no possibility of using it.

What we have to do is click on it and choose " Format " and choose a file system for the drive. In this way, the unit ready to use will appear.

This will cause loss of files on the drive

Solution 5: Loss of drive letter

In addition to finding a drive in RAW format, it is also possible that the only thing that has happened is that the drive is not assigned a letter. This is sufficient reason for the system not to recognize the hard drive as a storage device.

• What we will have to do in this case is right click on the drive in the disk manager and choose " Change the letter and paths to the drive " Now in the window that appears we choose " Add... " We assign the letter that we want and accept the changes. The unit should now reappear.

Solution 6: Write protected drive

Finally, we must put ourselves in the case in which the unit is write protected. To see what we can do in this case, we already have a tutorial that explains in detail the steps we must take.

We hope that with these solutions you can use your hard drive again.

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Have you been able to solve the problem? If not, write us in the comments. In this way we will know that we must seek more solutions in this regard.