Is your hard drive not recognized? Don’t worry, we have two solutions for this if your hard drive is not visible on your computer. Now restore your invisible disk and keep all your files.
It is more common than you would like: you plug an external hard drive or other USB devices into your PC, but it is not recognized or displayed on your computer at all. Many users report similar problems and this can ultimately lead to data loss and hard disk damage. Fortunately, there is still a lot you can do if your hard drive is not visible. Therefore, read the solutions in this article and restore your hard drive.
Here are the steps to make your hard drive visible in Windows 10/8/7 / XP / Vista
Check if the external hard drive is displayed in the drive manager
If your external hard drive is not displayed in My Computer / This PC, it is best to first open the Disk Management and check whether you can find your drive there.
Press the Windows key + R, in Run type diskmgmt.msc and press Enter.
This way you can find out why your hard drive is not recognized and what you can do about it.
Make sure the hard disk is recognized in various cases
Case 1. When the hard drive is displayed in drive management
If your hard disk or USB stick is not visible on my Computer or this PC, but in your disk management, it means that your disk does not contain any partitions and is therefore not visible. First, recover your hard drive data with data recovery software and then partition it.
To recover data on your unrecognized external hard drive:
Connect the external hard disk to the PC, start the EaseUS data recovery software, select the disk and click on ” Scan “.
A quick scan is first performed to find all lost and existing data on the disk. And then a deep scan is automatically started to find even more files.
Choose the lost files and click on ” Recover ” to retrieve them from your external hard drive that is not recognized.
Format the hard disk so that it appears on the computer:
1. Press Windows key + R, type diskmgmt.msc in the Run dialog box and press Enter.
2. In Disk Management, right-click the disk partition that you want to format, and then choose Format.
3. In the pop-up window, you can set the file system and the cluster size and then click OK.
Case 2. When the hard disk is not displayed in disk management
If you do not see the external hard drive in drive management, try the following steps to make it visible again:
Update the disk driver to make Windows recognize the hard disk
1. Open My Computer and choose System Properties.
2. In the taskbar on the left, click Device Manager and click “+” next to the USB controller. Then you see a yellow exclamation mark.
3. Right-click and choose Update Driver, then choose the option to automatically search for drivers.