External hard drive is not being recognized by computer

I have an external 1TB hard drive which is not being recognized by my computer.

When I connect the hard drive, it doesn't tell me that the device was installed properly and the drive doesn't appear under my computer.

When I open my devices, the hard drive is there but its status is needs troubleshooting but troubleshooting does not give any help. I also tried updating the drive's drivers to no avail, please help as I can't view my files.

external-hard-drive

trilla

Posted 2012-08-09T11:37:03.443

Reputation: 11

2Does the hard drive have an external power supply or is it USB powered? Is this a laptop or a desktop? And are you connecting using a USB hub? Also, has this hard drive ever worked with this machine before? – David Schwartz – 2012-08-09T11:40:30.953

Answers

I am assuming you're on Windows and since you can see it in device manager this could be a quick solution; you need to click start button, right click on My Computer and select manage.

From here, on the left, click disk management.

IF you can see your disk in here, right click on it and select change path or letter. Sometimes, just this step is enough, if not, change to a drive you're not using and that should do it.

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Also, at the risk of asking a silly question, I assume the external device is turned on? And if it is USB, you're not plugging in a USB2.0 into a USB3.0 port?

Dave

Posted 2012-08-09T11:37:03.443

Reputation: 24 199

I've had the same problem. The external hard rive was showing as offline. All I did was to right-click the drive in the Disk Management window and click "online" and the different partitions on the drive started showing up. – K. Rmth – 2014-12-07T21:45:39.843

@Dave Ok. Done. – K. Rmth – 2014-12-09T19:26:58.097

yeah...post a screenshot of disk management here. – tumchaaditya – 2012-08-10T11:01:06.420

I have a 1 TB hard drive split in 4 partitions. When plugging in the HDD into my usual machine, the usb icon in the taskbar usually shows the 4 partitions as "subs" under the "Transcend Disk Drive" heading.

On another computer, the usb icon in the taskbar only showed the "Transcend Disk Drive" heading but not the partitions. Additionally there were no disk drives displayed in the "My Computer" window.

To get the HDD to show up, I ran the Disk Management window via the Microsoft Management Console (run mmc.exe & click "Disk Management"); there, a 1 TB "Disk1" was showing as "offline". All that remained to be done was to right-click on the "Disk1" heading and click online.

The different partitions then became visible on the taskbar(via the usb icon) and also in the "My Computer" window.

EDIT:

The reverse process can be used to remove a HDD when a "safely remove" via the taskbar fails. Simply make the disk "offline" and unplug.

K. Rmth

Posted 2012-08-09T11:37:03.443

Reputation: 169