Power on your computer and plug in the external hard drive. Check the Power, Cable and Portīefore getting to Windows, you should check the power, cable and port. We’re going to run through the steps you should take if your hard drive isn’t showing up on Windows.
Windows includes multiple tools for diagnosing a hard drive, but it, unfortunately, makes them difficult to access.
How to Solve an External Hard Drive Not Showing Up on Windows In fact, we needed to do that when we tested the Western Digital My Book on macOS (read our Western Digital My Book review). It can get messy, but in some cases, you’ll need to dig into the guts of your OS and configure your external hard drive.
That said, the most likely issue is that your hard drive isn’t ready to be used with your OS. Sometimes, those systems, or even the file structure, get out of sorts, causing the OS to not recognize the drive, which can be further complicated with drivers. Hard drives associate with computers using what’s known as file systems, which you can learn about in our how to format an external hard drive guide. That said, there are usually reasons in your operating system that can cause a hard drive not to show. If your external hard drive isn’t showing up, many things could be causing the issue, including problems with your computer, a hard drive that’s dead on arrival, a fault cable and more. Why Your External Hard Drive Isn’t Showing Up The steps are mostly the same for Windows and macOS, but we’ve covered both so you don’t get lost.īefore getting to that, though, we want to discuss the reasons your hard drive may not be showing up. In this guide on how to solve an external hard drive not showing up, we’re going to go over the major troubleshooting steps you should take before returning your disk. It’s the nature of the beast, unfortunately, and though it can be disappointing to see nothing after unboxing your shiny, new external hard drive, the solution is likely only a few clicks away. No matter how extensively we test our best external hard drives for errors, some units will have problems.
If you think the drive works fine, let us see if we can manually attach it to macOS.
By default, it doesn’t display much and the setting to not show external disks may be enabled.
Use a USB power cable if you suspect this to be the issue.ĭepending on what you find here, you can troubleshoot either the drive or your Mac.įirst, make sure Finder will display drive icons. A USB cable carries 5V and if this is the sole power source for the drive, it may not be enough.
Reboot your Mac to see if it was an open program or app stopping the drive from being detected.Try a different wall outlet if there is one nearby.Change the hard drive power cable if you have a spare.Check the condition of the cable and swap it if you have a spare.Check that the external hard drive has power if it needs it.Check that the cable from the hard drive to your Mac is connected properly.After all, no one wants to waste half a day because they didn’t realize something just wasn’t plugged in properly. Get into the habit of doing this with any computer issues, as it can save time, money, and hassle in the long run.