Why the external hard drive cannot be recognized by computer? How to fix the external hard drive which is not recognized by Windows system? You may have an external hard drive which has not been used for a long time, but one day you may find that it stopped working. It cannot be detected by the computer so you cannot access to the files on the drive. Although you have connected it with computer via the USB cable, it still display the notification that the USB device is not recognized. There are several causes for your external hard drive cannot be recognized. Such as the dead USB port, dead external hard drive,driver problem, file system problem, etc. To make the external hard drive recognized, you can follow these steps.
Disk management
The external hard drive has a power switch, so you need to turn on the power switch to make sure it can be detected.
If your external hard drive does not show up in My computer or Computer, you can check if it is in the disk management. If it is listed in the Disk management, it stands for it has been recognized by your computer. You can search the disk management in the Run window. If you find an unallocated drive here, you should format it to make it can be recognized.
Make a further check
If your external hard drive cannot show up in the disk management, you should make a further check. It may be a driver problem, USB port issues or a dead drive.
First, you need to unplug the external hard drive and connect it to other USB ports, or other computers. If it works in one USB port but not others, the USB ports may dead. If you use an USB hub, the external hard drive may cannot get enough power so that cannot be recognized, so you should connect it to computer directly. If the external drive does not work on other computer, it may dead so that you need to replace with a new one.
If it does work on other computers, it may have a driver problem. You can check in the Device manager. Find your eternal drive in Disk drives, it there is a yellow exclamation mark, you need to check the error message and try to fix this problem. You can choose to update driver, install an updated driver, roll back driver, or to use the system restore to fix the driver problems.
What you must note is that back up your data before you format or partitioning the drive. To fix the unallocated drive, you need to format it , assign drive letter, and then to partitioning it. Data on the recognized but inaccessible drive can be recovered with data recovery software.
Have you get the key to fix your unrecognized external hard drive? If you still have questions about external hard drive problems and data recovery, you can turn to Hdata recovery for help.