Solved External Hard Drives Stopped Working

[Lhex]

I have two 1-TB external drives which were working perfectly until 10 min ago. I have already tried uninstalling them from the Device Manager, and restarted the PC but it didn't help. My motherboard is Gigabyte Ultradurable 3. I am out of opinions, so thanks a lot for any helps in advance.

 

[ben946210]

Does the drive turn on at all? Try using another USB cable and see if that works. If that doesn't work: If you are willing, open the hard drive and try to connect it to the motherboard. Then try to boot into Windows and see if it shows up. If not, try UBCD to boot into hard drive diagnose of the brand of the HDD and do short and long test on the drive.
You can download UBCD from Ultimate Boot CD - Overview if you don't already have a copy.


Best of luck!

 

[Lhex]

OK then, I'll try those and see if it'll fix. Thanks a lot clearfire62

 

[boohbah]

when you say they worked until 10 mins ago, are they still showing when you click computer in the start menu . have you tried a simple re-boot,
have you installed anything recently.

 

[Lhex]

Well, they were working fine, then first one of them just disappeared in the "My Computer", saying "USB Device Not Recognized", and after 2-3 min, the second one did the same. they both are seem to be working, their lights are on. Changing the cables doesn't help. I've recently formatted my PC, and added another internal hard drive. But I'm not sure if it is connected somehow with the problem. I've cancelled the internal hard drive afterwards. I haven't opened the externals and tried to connect them as internals yet, but if I cannot find any other solutions, I will try that.

 

[whs]

Do they appear in Disk Management and what does it say about them - filesystem, drive letter, etc.

 

[boohbah]

can you try putting the usb cables into different ports.

 

[Lhex]

OK, it is working again. I tried changing the cable once but it didn't help yesterday. I tried it with another cable today and it seems to be fixed. Thank you very much for your answers.

 

[ben946210]

Good to hear , thanks for posting your results.

 

[Lhex]

No problem, thanks for posting the solution