Just wanted to follow up on this. The issue I was having was windows stopped assigning drive letters to usb hdd's.
Using disk management, if I manually assigned the drive letter, the drive would appear and function normally.
Great thread, had the info I needed to solved this problem I've been having for months. Thanks guys.
I have experienced a USB external hard drive that is not recognized in "Computer" and is therefore not accessible. The drive does appear normally in Device Manager. Sometimes an external drive which has been in normal use shifts into this situation. In my case the drive appeared to have lost its "designation".
Other brands of USB external hard drive plugged into the computer are also not recognized, but flash drives are recognized.
The external hard drive appears normally and works when plugged into other computers.
To recapture the drive designation on the computer experiencing the problem -
Go to Contol Panel - Administrative Tools - Computer Management - Storage - Disk Management. In my case the drive appeared, but has no designation letter. I right clicked on the "blank" drive and then
selected "Make Drive Active" and "Change Drive Letter and Paths". That seems to resolve the problem.
Hello, I have the same problem. the external drive is shown in Disk management as Online burt Explorer does not show it. It works with other laptops perfectly. It cannot be the port because other external HDDs will show up as usual. Any other suggestion what to do?
Hi all, I know this post is really old but I've recently found a solution. My HDD (from all in one pc) randomly stopped and wouldn't boot. Well, I was using Audacity to normalize music tracks, and it was importing them all, so I let it run overnight. Then next day the drive had and I/O error and wouldn't boot. I removed it and connected to my laptop as an external drive with USB cable. I could see the drive in explorer and drive manager but it showed 0 media and had no options available. Following instructions on various forums I tried assigning drive letter Z, no change. And everything short of putting it in the freezer ( I didn't try this as all advice was, it would only be temporary fix). From everything I read, my drive was dead and not worth saving.
But I have important info on there and don't wish to pay thousands to retrieve it. Being a rather determined person, I pulled apart another PC and installed the drive with SATA to run the windows repair disk (the original pc didn't have CD Rom) sadly windows couldn't repair it. I tried several partition and file recovery programs. Some couldn't see the drive, others saw it but couldn't access it. Then I thought to try something else. I found instructions here: Windows 7 - Create a system repair USB key to create a windows 7 repair USB> So I put my drive back in it's PC, changed the BIOS to boot from USB first. The BIOS could see the drive, so it wasn't dead! In Windows repair I went to command prompt and typed in
DISKPART
then LIST DISK - and it was there, not 0 but full size! and online
then LIST VOL - and I could see the original partitions
SELECT VOL 0 (whichever one you need)
ACTIVE (to make it usable)
then I tried to format - did this several times, each time I lost the drive and it couldn't format. DON"T DO THIS I found a better way. So after you make it ACTIVE
ASSIGN - (to give it a name. no extras just ASSIGN)
EXIT - then exit repair. Shut down the PC.
Remove the drive and install as external on another machine.
AMAZING!! it now shows up and windows says "you must format this drive to use it". Well that's ok, because you can recover the data after format.
I used Stellar Phoenix but there are many others. It takes for ever!!but it's a 1TB drive. And I stopped it into the meta file search as I could see it was going to take days (which I don't have). And there was all my files.
I just want to say...Don't give up, they may tell you the drive is dead, but it may not be.
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