Unrecognized external hard drive data recovery data recovery tools

Sometimes, when you plug an external hard drive or an USB device into your computer, the system has no response, or you can hear the connection sound but the device still not be recognized. When you open My Computer, you still cannot find any removable storage devices there.

Occasionally, the external hard drive is inaccessible due to a drive letter conflict. That is to say, the Windows named the external a drive letter which has been used by others.

You can fix this problem easily:

1. Press Window key and input “diskmgmt.msc” in the Run window.

2. Open the disk management, you can tell your external drive from others by its size.

3. Right-click your external hard drive and select the option of “Change Drive Letter and path”, click change.

4. Choose a drive letter to rename your external hard drive and click change.

5. Click Yes in the pops up dialog box.

6. Then you cannot find the drive letter of your external hard drive . And your external hard drive is displayed in My computer.

Why my external hard drive does not shown in Disk Management?

If you cannot find your external hard drive in Disk Management, you have to make a further check of your USB ports,driver…

1. Check USB port

To rule out this problem, you can insert your drive into another USB ports. You can try all the front and back USB port on computer host.

If your external hard drive still not shown in Disk Management, you can insert it to the USB ports of other computer. If it still cannot be recognized, you may need to replace your external hard drive.

2. Driver problems

The driver problems may also can cause your hard drive cannot be recognized. Use a device manager to check it.

Press Windows key and input “devmgmt.msc” in the Run Windows. Press Enter. If there is a yellow exclamation mark, it can be conclude that the driver has a problem. You can right-click your device and choose properties, carefully checking the error messages. Please update the driver.

3. Partitioning the hard drive

If the hard drive has not been partitioned, it is possible that it cannot be recognized or access. You need to create new partitions on the unallocated space. You can partitioning in the disk management. Right-click the unallocated space to create a new partition.

How to partition hard drive without formatting how to recover files from drive partitions

4. Format the hard drive

If the hard drive has ever been partitioned but still is inaccessible, you may need to format it to other files system.

Whenever you need to format or re-partitioning your external hard drive, you should back up your data first, or you will lost all your data stored on external hard drive.

How to recover files from an unrecognized external hard drive?

Data recovery software is always the best way to restore files.