It really is annoying when your external hard drive doesn’t get recognized after unplugging. Abruptly ejecting the drive without following proper steps can result in such problems. Sometimes, even if the external hard drive gets detected by the system, it would still ask you to format the drive before using it. So you need to fix the problem to make the external disk recognizable and also access its contents.
Let’s see how to fix this issue:
Method 1: Change USB Port:
Try connecting the external hard drive to another USB port, and see if it works fine. Or else, connect the external disk to another computer to see if the issue is with the computer. If the problem persists, then move on to the next method.
Method 2: Change the drive letter:
The first thing to do is to check if the drive is listed in Disk Management or Device Manager.
- To check if the external hard drive is listed in Disk Management, go to Start – Run – type msc¸and hit Enter
- To check if the drive is listed in Device Manager: go to Start – Run – type msc and hit Enter
So if the drive is present, then you just need to make it detectable on your computer. Follow this guide to make the drive recognizable on the system.
Step 1: In Disk Management, right-click on the external hard drive (displayed as “unallocated” state), and select “Change Drive Letter and Paths” option
Step 2: Now change the drive letter for this external hard drive, and click OK to save the change
Method 3: Update drivers
- In This PC, click on Manage. In the Computer Management window, select Device Manager and go to Universal Serial Bus controllers option
- Now locate and right-click on the external hard drive. Select Update Driver Software
- Next select Search automatically for updated driver software and Windows will help you in updating the latest drivers automatically.
So once the external hard drive is detecting on the system, you need to recover data from it. You can use this Partition Recovery tool to get back files. It will retrieve files in just a short while. The software helps to recover data from iOmega external hard drive when it is not recognized, Western Digital drive after format, Seagate drive after corruption, and other such data loss situations.
