External hdd recovery How to fix external hard drive in windows?

Sometimes, if you connect your external hard drive to computer to access your files, but instead, you find no files, or the drive become inaccessible or even you can not find your external drive on your computer. Then what would you do? There are various causes for the external hard drive become unrecognized. Such as the broken USB cable and port, driver problem, wrong file system, drive letter conflicts,etc. The most serious situation is that the external hard drive is dead.

How to fix the unrecognized external hard drive?

First, you need to confirm if the external hard drive show up in the disk management or not.

Connect your external hard drive to computer. You should turn on the power switch on the external drive. Type diskmgmt.msc in the Run dialog, press Enter to open the Disk Management. If your external hard drive can be detected by computer, it will be listed here. You can choose to format it to make it accessible. If your external hard drive does not show up here, let’s move on.

If the external hard drive does not in disk management, it may for the drive has some hardware issues. It could be the USB port failure. You can check by plunging it with another USB port. If you have other computer, you can check by plunging it with other computers.

If the external hard drive can be detected by other computers, you external drive may have a driver problem. You can check this in the Device management. In the Device manager, you should check if there is a device with a yellow exclamation mark. If there is, your external hard drive may have driver problems. To fix this problem, you should right-click the yellow exclamation mark and check the error messages in Properties. If the driver has recently changed,you can use system restore to solve this problem. Also, you can right-click the drive, select properties, Click Roll back driver or update driver in Driver tab.

You may have learned a lot about how to troubleshoot and fix the unrecognized external hard drive.If your external hard drive still does not show up in the disk management, it may have dead. You need to replace a new one, If your external hard drive can be detected but unaccesisble, you can format it in Disk management. Before you format or partitioning the external drive, you need to back up all your data on the drive. If you had data loss on the drive, you need to try the data recovery software to retrieve the data at the first time. Once the data has been overwritten, they will not be recovered.