How to Fix External Drive Not Recognized Error in Windows

one of the most frustrating problems a Windows user can encounter is when external drives don't show up on your computer this is Ben stegner from makeuseup.com and today I'm going to show you how to fix the problem of Windows not detecting your device normally all you have to do to use an external device is plug it into your computer but there are times when it's not this easy whether you've got a brand new external drive that won't show up at all or suddenly have issues with a flash drive follow these steps to diagnose and fix your issue first plug the external drive into your PC and make sure that it's powered on most small external drives and nearly all flash drives don't need an extra power source and many have lights that flash to let you know there's activity happening if you have a large desktop external drive you may have to plug in a separate power cable or flip a switch on the side of it to get it to turn on check your user manual if you're not sure next let's open up the Disk Management tool to see if Windows recognizes your device press the Windows key and the r key to open the Run window and then type disk mgmt.msc to open it up once you do that you're going to see the windows Disk Management window check out the list of disks on this page if Windows recognizes your device it'll show up here even if this PC doesn't show it in the bottom sector here if you see a disk with some unallocated space you found the disk that isn't recognized by Windows you have to initialize a disk before Windows recognizes it and you can do that process here right click on any unallocated space on your disk and click and choose new simple volume which you don't see here because I don't have an unallocated disk step through that easy process and windows will recognize that disk once you're done if you still don't see your device in this list even though it has a partition meaning that it doesn't show the unallocated space label you might have to manually assign a drive letter go ahead and right-click the affected device and choose change Drive letter and paths you can click add if there's no letter or change if you need to change it and you can pick any letter you like something later in the alphabet like G or J should work fine a third scenario to why your device might not show up in this window as if it was partitioned with a different operating system Windows can't recognize something that was formatted with Linux or Mac OS if that's the case you need to find your affected drive here and right click on it and choose format Windows will warn you that formatting the device will permanently erase everything on it so if you have anything on that drive that you don't want to lose make sure you bring it to a window or to a Linux or Mac machine so you can copy those files to safety once you've done that you can plug it back into your Windows PC click yes on this warning give your drive a new name if you want to and then choose a file system for most devices the NTFS format is the best because it's the newest and carries the most features but if it's a smaller drive like a flash drive or you want it to be backwards compatible with older systems you can choose FAT32 you can leave the allocation unit size as default in a quick format will work fine click OK let that run through and then you'll have a drive that formatted for Windows you may also have to use FAT32 if you plan on using this flash drive on an older device like an Xbox 360 or media players now this shows what to do if you're if the device shows up in the Disk Management window but let's talk about what to do if it doesn't show up here first you should try a different USB port on your computer if it works on a different one the one that was initially plugged into might be dead and if you're plugging your drive into a USB hub or expander try plugging it directly into your computer instead because sometimes these Hubs Don't Give enough power for devices to work if you still don't see your drive in this window after you've tried a new USB port take that device and try plugging it into a different Windows computer follow the steps we talked about here to check for the drive and Disk Management if you don't see the device on the second computer's Disk Management you've almost certainly got a dead Drive but if the device does work on another machine Windows could have a driver issue on your computer and there's another place we can check for that open the device manager by pressing the Windows key and R like we did before and type Dev mgmt.msc after you hit enter you'll see the Windows device manager window open look at the disk drives header and expand that you should see all of the disks on your machine here and you'll hopefully see the one that's connected but not working in this case it's the Kingston data traveler on my machine if you see a little yellow exclamation mark warning that means there's a problem you can right click on the device and choose properties and it will tell you in this area about the error that's pertaining to it try a Google search with that error message and see if there's an easy fix for it while that might help you with specific devices there are a few things you can do in general if the problem started recently you can run through a Windows system restore to go back to a few days ago when it was working you can also go to the driver Tab and choose update driver and click search automatically this usually won't find a new driver but there's a chance it'll fix your problem if you want to take a heavier solution you can click uninstall device to completely remove it from your system once you unplug and replug in that USB device Windows should automatically detect and install the new driver sometimes driver issues can be fixed with a driver update but this doesn't really apply to flash drives and external hard drives because they use generic drivers but if your device came with an installation CD it's worth a try to run the update utility from that you can also try Googling your device name to see if the manufacturer provides newer drivers for it but you shouldn't install drivers from third-party sites because those are only going to lead to more issues if you go through all these steps and the disk never shows up in the device manager on more than one computer unfortunately you probably have a dead device because this PC only shows devices that windows can use the disk manager still shows everything connected to your computer so if it doesn't show up here it's probably completely dead and you'll need to buy a new device hopefully one of these Solutions fixed your disk issue in Windows to read this guide in article form as well as checking out our other how to's Hardware reviews and giveaways head on over to make use of.com and thanks for watching

Channel: MakeUseOf

Views: 935,571

Keywords: external drive not recognized, how to, windows tutorial, windows usb drive, windows external drive, drive not recognized windows 10, drive not recognized windows 7, drive not recognized in disk management, how to fix external hard drive not detected, external hard drive not showing up in my computer, external hard drive not working, hard drive not detected, external hard drive not detected, external hard disk not detected in windows 10, external hard disk not detected

Id: qG3Tr4r1xnI

Length: 6min 24sec (384 seconds)

Published: Sun May 07 2017