unable to see my hard drive in Windows Explorer

Hi,

I am unable to see my hard drive in Windows Explorer, whenever I connect my external hard drive in USB port it doesn’t appear in the system. Can anyone please tell me what should I do now to get access to my hard drive.

What OS are you using?

Is it a new hard drive? Have you tested it in other USB ports or other computers? Or other hard drives on the same computer?

You may want to go to disk management and have a nosey in there - located in start / windows administrative tools / computer management.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Adin

Hi,

I am unable to see my hard drive in Windows Explorer, whenever I connect my external hard drive in USB port it doesn’t appear in the system. Can anyone please tell me what should I do now to get access to my hard drive.

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Had that problem, luckily I had a mac, as I simply plugged it in that to see if it would appear. And it did, just formatted it to windows. Plugged into the PC and it appeared.

Hi,

There can be number of reasons for not showing your hard drive in Windows explorer. Please read below to know the possible reason for the hard drive invisibility.

USB port is damaged- it might be possible that the USB port is damaged so I would suggest you to insert the drive in another port and check if it starts recognizing in system.

Device is hidden from the device manager- In this situation you need to go to the device manager window and choose show hidden device option under view tab.

Hard drive Turned RAW- Sometimes, it happens when hard drive lost its file system and turned into RAW form. In this situation you need to format your hard drive to make it viewable again in Windows.

Note: If your hard drive turned into RAW form and have important data in it then first you need to download Stellar Phoenix Windows data recovery software which can retrieve data from the RAW format hard drive and then format your hard drive for reuse.

Thanks!!

Nevermind...

How about the same letter been assigned to the driver under 'Disk Management'? Open up, see if your drive can be seen there and then assign a new letter to it, if necessary or format as required. (Right click on This PC > Manage > Disk Management).

If you can't see it in Disk Management, open a command line and try Diskpart.

At the command prompt type:

Diskpart


then type:

List disk

If diskpart can't see it, it's probably a hardware issue.