Summary: Internal hard disk or external hard disk detected/recognized but not accessible/opening on Windows computer? No worries! You can turn to this complete guide to learn how to repair your internal external hard drive or external hard drive and recover your data as well.

• External Hard Disk Not Showing
• External Hard Drives Not Shown
• Hdd Connected But Not Showing
• External Hard Disk Connected But Not Showing Data
• External Hard Drive Not Showing Up Windows

External Hard Drive Is Not Showing Up/Not Appearing When Connected. An external hard drive is similar to the type of hard drive (HDD) that you can find inside your computer. An external hard drive is, of course, connected outside of the computer, thus making it portable, and easily transported, stored, and connected to other systems. But, when you see that the connected hard drive is not showing up in the Windows file explorer. Mainly, this problem occurs due to partition issues on the external drive, using the wrong file system, dead USB ports, or driver issues in Windows, etc. Fix External Hard Disk Not Showing or Not Detecting in Windows 10/8.1/7 Facebook Page: Follow on twitter: https://twitter. How to recover files from external hard drive not detected: connect your drive to a PC with a USB port and find the external hard.

Nowadays, external hard drives are inexpensive, but they offer outstanding performance, fast speed and light weight. There are different brands of external hard drives, such as Seagate, WD, Toshiba and Lacie. All of them often offer advanced features to protect your data, save and share files between different platforms more flexible.

However, you may get into troubles in opening external hard drives on your Widnows computer. So, it's important to know how to use it in the right way.

What is an external hard drive and how to use it?

An external hard drive is a portable storage device that can be attached to a computer on the outside rather than on the inside. It should be essential when you want to quickly and easily expand the storage space of your computer as well as back up your important music, photos and files.

Almost all the external hard drives are plug-and-play. To use an external hard drive, you can just plug it in the computer USB port. You will need an adapter if your computer has a USB-C port. Normally, Windows will automatically shows the drive in File Explore.

But sometimes because of faulty cable, damaged USB port, incorrect file system, driver issues, etc., the drive keeps blinking but it can't be showing up or opening in Windows Explore. The following is a query from a forum:

I have an 80GB Seagate external hard drive that I connect to my Windows computer to store files but for some reason, just recently, it has stopped showing up in the 'My Computer' folder. It shows up as a device in device manager but I don't know how to open it. Why is my external hard drive detected but cannot open?

Actually, this issue is more common than external hard disk like SSD not detected on Windows or Mac. Now, try these workarounds in this article to fix the external hard disk detected but not accessible/opening issue without losing data.

Fix external hard disk detected but not accessible/opening issue?

To fix this issue, you may try more than one solutions. Let's take a look at how to diagnose undetected external hard drives in Windows.

Solution 1:Make sure your external hard drive is power on

The first and obvious step is to check whether the external hard drive is spinning or not. If it does, the power supply is not an issue at hand. Otherwise, the drive doesn't have enough power to function. In this situation, you can try plugging it into another outlet or swapping the cable if possible. If you've plugged the drive into a USB hub, try connecting it directly to your PC.

Solution 2:Try another USB port

The problem may lie in the USB port you're using to connect the external hard drive to your computer. To check this issue, you can unplug the drive from its current USB port and try plugging it into another port on your computer. If the drive works as normal in a different USB port, you may have a dead USB port.

Solution 3:Restart your Windows computer

Whenever you face with frozen screens, crashing programs or inaccessible removable disks, you can save anything you are working on and restart your computer before you freak out.

A simple restart can flush out all RAM (Random Access Memory), stop outdated or glitch programs, etc. Safely remove the external hard drive from your computer. Click the Windows icon or 'Start' in the bottom left corner. Locate the Power icon and select 'Restart'.

Solution 4:Plug the drive to a Mac computer

If you connect a Mac-formatted drive to your Windows computer, you'll be informed that 'You need to formatted the disk in drive *: before you can use it' This error message appears because Windows doesn't understand Apple file system, including HFS+ and the latest APFS.

To make sure of this, you can plug the drive to a Mac computer to see if it can be used without problem.

If you can see it showing up in Finder and delete files on the drive, you can make sure the drive is formatted for macOS. That's fine, you should back up your important data on another storage device and then reformat it to exFAT or FAT32 on Mac.

Alternatively, you can use third-party software to read mac formatted drive on Windows. If the external hard drive still cannot be readable on Mac, go on the following solutions.

Solution 5:Troubleshoot driver issues

While you're having a problem with your hardware, you should associate with outdated drivers. Although Windows 10 automatically handle driver updates, but it isn't perfect. Sometimes, it will leave some essential driver updates behind.

So you should keep an eye on any security updates and different driver versions that pop up. If you missed the pop-ups or ignored them, it's not a big deal. You can update drivers in Device Manager.

In the search box on the task bar, enter 'device manager' and then select 'Device Manager'. Double-click 'Disk drives' to expand the category. If you see any devices with yellow exclamation point next to them, that device has a driver problem.

You need to right-click the device with the issue, select 'Update driver software' and click 'Automatically search for drive software online...'. When the update progress finishes, reboot your computer and then reconnect the external hard drive to your PC to see whether it can be accessed.

Solution 6:Check if the external hard drive is not showing up in Disk Management

The next thing is to check whether Windows detects the hard disk.

Plug your external hard drive if it isn't already. Right-click the Start button on the desktop to open Quick Access Menu and then choose 'Disk Management'.

You can also open the Run dialog with Windows key + X and enter diskmgmt.msc to open the Disk Management which is a tool to initialize and reformat external hard drives in Windows.

In the Disk Management window, you will see all the hard disks connected to your Windows computer, along with their size, partitions and other disk information. You should see your external hard drive listed in the window, even if it has no drive letter or displays as unallocated, unknown, not initialized, offline. Let's see how to fix these 4 cases:

Note: If the external hard disk not showing up in Disk Management, unfortunately, the drive might have been physically damaged and can't be recognized by Windows operating system. If so, you can only send it to a local repair center or replace it with a new one.

Case 1: If the drive is unallocated in Disk Management, create a new volume

• 1. Right-click on the unallocated space and choose 'New Simple Volume'.
• 2. In the 'New Simple Volume Wizard', select 'Next'.
• 3. Enter the volume size and click 'Next'.
• 4. Give the new volume a letter or path. You can select from the drop down menu and click 'Next'.
• 5. Choose whether you want to format the partition. If you want use the partition, you must tick 'Format this volume with the following settings'.
• 6. Complete the setting for the new volume, including File System, size and volume label.
• 7. Select 'Perform a quick format' and click on the 'Next' button.

Case 2: If the drive has no drive letter, change the drive letter and paths

• 1. Right-click the external hard drive and choose 'Change Drive Letter and Paths' from the context menu.
• 2. If the device doesn't have a drive letter, you should click on the 'Add' button in the pop-up window and choose one. If the device has a drive letter, click 'Change' and try another one.
• 3. Click 'OK' to confirm.
• 4. Give the new volume a letter or path. You can select from the drop down menu and click 'Next'.
• 5. Choose whether you want to format the partition. If you want use the partition, you must tick 'Format this volume with the following settings'.
• 6. Complete the setting for the new volume, including file system, size and volume label.
• 7. Select 'Perform a quick format' and click on the 'Next' button.

Case 3: If the drive is unknown or not initialized, initialise it.

• 1. Right-click on the unknown, not initialized disk and choose 'Initialise Disk' from the context menu.
• 2. Select a partition style from MBR and GPT.
• 3. Click 'OK' and wait for the operation to complete.

Case 4: If the drive is offline, set online.

• 1. Right-click on the offline disk.
• 2. Choose 'Online' from the pop-up menu.

Important:How to recover lost data from external hard drives?

If you have tried the solutions above, all your data stored on the external hard drive is erased. If you didn't back up important data, you may wonder how to get lost data back. Read the following tutorial.

You can also watch this short video tutorial to perform external hard drive data recovery:

It's high recommended to use iBoysoft Data Recovery, a free external hard drive data recovery software. It is able to recover lost data from external hard drives in various situations, such asexternal hard drive inaccessible, corrupted, unreadable, formatted/not formatted,unallocated, RAW, etc.

Besides, it also recovers data from corrupted USB drives, Pen drives, SD cards, memory cards, CF cards and much more external storage devices on Windows 10/8/7/Vista/XP and Windows Server 2019/2016/2012/2008/2003.

• 1. Free download iBoysoft Data Recovery and install it.
• 2. Connect the external hard drive to your Mac computer and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery.
• 3. Choose the inaccessible external hard drive and click 'Next' to start scanning for all lost files.
• 4. When the scanning process finished, the search results will be displayed on the interface. You are able to double-click the files to preview. Then select files you want to get back and click 'Recover'.
• 5. Go over the recovered files to make sure all the lost files have been successfully recovered.

Note: If you fails to find the desired files, you can click on the 'Back' button, select the drive again and then tick 'Deep scan' at the bottom. This operation will scan the drive sector by sector.

Solution 7:Run Windows Troubleshooter

Windows Troubleshooter is a small tool to quickly diagnose and automatically fix common computer problems with devices and hardware, such as network and printer connectivity, Windows update, Bluetooth and a lot more. Here is how to run Troubleshooter on Windows 10:

• 1. Go to Start > Settings and choose 'Update and Security' from Windows Settings panel.
• 2. Go to the Troubleshoot tab and scroll down to choose 'Hardware and Device' from the right panel.
• 3. Click 'Run the Troubleshooter'.
• 4. Once the scan finishes, you need to choose the issue you want to fix and click 'Next'.

Solution 8:Run CHKDSK to repair the inaccessible external hard drive

CHKDSK is a non-destructive utility to fix disk errors such as bad sectors, file table corruption, etc. You can try to repair the corrupted external hard disk without worrying about data loss.

• 1. Type 'cmd' into the search box from Start. From the search results, right-click on Command Prompt and select Run as Administrator.
• 2. Enter 'chkdsk *: /r ' in the pop-up window and press 'Enter'. For example, if the not accessible/opening drive is disk H, enter 'chkdsk h: /r'
• 3. Reboot your computer and see whether the external hard drive is showing up in This PC/My Computer and can open.

Solution 9: Reformat the external hard drive

If you have tried all these solutions above, but you still cannot access the external hard drive. The last attempt is to reformat the drive. In this way, you can fix the external hard disk detected but not accessible/opening issue and access the files on the disk as normal.

• 1. Go to Disk Management.
• 2. Right-click on the external hard disk and select 'Format'.
• 3. Setup the required information and click Start. The process will finish in minutes.

Additionally, if the external hard disk is physically dead, you need torecover lost data from the dead external hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery and then send it to an expert.

It happens that a Toshiba external hard drive is not working in Windows, be it not showing up, not recognized, or not showing files. Given the varying situation, we will show you how to fix 'Toshiba external hard drive not working' according to your exact scenario and present you the Toshiba hard drive recovery tool to rescue your data on the storage medium.

1TB Toshiba External Hard Drive Is Not Working and Undetectable, Help!

'Hi there, do you know how to make external hard drive show up in PC when it failed to be detected? I have 1TB Toshiba external hard drive with almost 500GB data saved on it. It suddenly disappeared from my PC but the light of the drive is still on. What's going on with my drive? Do know you how to fix this issue?'

External hard drive not showing up or detected is just one of the many situations that indicate your Toshiba hard drive is not working. To help you fix your problematic device quickly, you should specify your situation according to the steps below before applying the fixes for 'Toshiba external hard drive not working'.

Step 1. Connect your Toshiba hard disk to your computer using the Toshiba cable.

Step 2. Go to 'This PC' > 'Manage' > 'Disk Management'.

Then you will see yourself in one of the following cases:

External Hard Disk Not Showing

• The Toshiba external hard drive is not showing in Disk Management or in This PC
• The Toshiba hard drive is showing up in Disk Management but not in This PC
• The Toshiba disk is showing up in both Disk Management and This PC but is inaccessible
• The hard drive is detected but not showing any files
• The Toshiba external hard drive light blinking but not working

Fixes for Toshiba External Hard Drive Not Working

When your Toshiba hard drive is not working, you may find yourself in one of the situations listed above. Identify your situation and follow to see the possible causes and the solutions to fix your Toshiba hard drive.

Situation 1. Toshiba External Hard Drive Is Not Showing Up in This PC and Disk Management

Possible causes: Connection issues, outdated Toshiba external hard drive driver, physical damage on the disk

Based on the possible reasons why your Toshiba external hard drive is not working, you have three methods to try:

Method 1. Check the Hard Drive Connection

There are many tips you can try to check the connection between your Toshiba external hard drive and your computer.

• Connect your Toshiba external hard drive to another USB port, including the rear ones, on your computer
• Use the original cable to connect your hard drive
• Use another cable to connect your Toshiba hard disk
• Connect your Toshiba hard drive to another computer

Method 2. Update the Toshiba External Hard Drive Driver

If the Toshiba hard drive is still not working, try to update the device driver. An outdated or corrupted hard drive driver will cause some problems while using the device. Since your hard drive is not detected by the PC, you cannot update the driver via Device Manager. Go to the official site of Toshiba, then download and install the latest driver by entering your model or the serial number of your disk.

Method 3. Send for Manual Repair

External Hard Drives Not Shown

If you are sure there is physical corruption on your Toshiba external hard drive or the disk is still not working after trying the methods above, you are recommended to send the Toshiba hard drive for manual repair.

Situation 2. Toshiba External Hard Drive Is Showing Up in Disk Management But Not in This PC

Possible Causes: Toshiba external hard drive driver issues, drive letter conflicts

A Toshiba external hard drive that is not working in such a case may be caused by a problematic device driver or a drive letter conflict between your Toshiba external disk and the partition on your computer. The solutions are easy:

Method 1. Update Toshiba External Hard Drive Driver

Since your device is detectable, you can update the driver via the Device Manager.

Step 1. Connect the Toshiba external hard drive to PC, right-click on 'This PC' (in Windows 10) and choose 'Properties'.

Step 2. Click 'Device Manager' then expand “Disk drives”. Find and right-click the problematic USB drive and select 'Update driver'

Step 3. Click 'automatically search for driver software online'.

Step 4. Wait for the driver to be updated, then reboot your computer. Afterward, you can try to reconnect your USB drive to PC and check whether the USB drive shows up or not.

Method 2. Change Driver Letter

Step 1. Go to 'This PC', right-click it and choose 'Manage' > 'Disk Management'.

Step 2. Right-click the volume on your USB flash drive/external hard drive and select 'Change Drive Letter and Paths'.

Step 3. In the new window, click 'Change'.

Step 4. Assign a new drive letter to your USB and click 'OK'.

Situation 3. Toshiba External Hard Drive Is Detectable But Inaccessible

Possible causes: MBR corruption, I/O device error, file system errors...

You may see your Toshiba external hard drive state is 'Not Initialized' or 'No Media' in Disk Managemen, your disk shows RAW file system or the partition on it is lost (showing as unallocated space). All make your device inaccessible. To fix 'Toshiba external hard drive not working' in the last two situations, you can:

Method 1. Recover Data from the Toshiba External Hard Drive and Format It

If the partition on your Toshiba disk is RAW, don't worry. You can use the hard drive recovery software - EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard to recover data from the inaccessible disk and then format the device to assign a new file system to it, which will make it usable again.

To recover data from your RAW drive:

Step 1. Choose the external hard drive

Since you're going to recover data from the external hard drive, run EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard and under the External Devices tab, choose the exact drive where you lost data. Click Scan.

Step 2. Scan for lost data

Hdd Connected But Not Showing

The software will start immediately to scan all over the selected drive for all lost data. During the scan, you could see more and more data showing up in the results.

Step 3. Preview and recover data

After the scan is over, check the scan results for the desired data. You can preview the file by double-clicking on it. Click Recover and choose another location to save the recovered data.

To format your Toshiba disk:

Step 1. Open 'This PC', right-click your RAW drive or RAW disk and choose 'Formatted'.

Step 2. Set a file system (NTFS, FAT32, or exFAT) according to your needs and click 'Start'.

Step 3. In the Warning window, click 'OK' to start formatting your storage medium.

Method 2. Recover Data from the Toshiba Disk and Create Partition

You may see your Toshiba hard drive shows up as unallocated space because the partition is lost. In such a case, you can also use the EaseUS data recovery software to recover data from your Toshiba external hard drive and then create new partitions on it to make it usable. Since the way to perform data recovery has been detailed already, here we will show you how to create new partitions on your disk only.

Step 1. Right-click 'This PC', choose 'Manage' > 'Disk Management'.

Step 2. Right-click the unallocated space and choose 'New Simple Volume'.

Step 3. Follow the wizard to finish the remaining process.

Situation 4. The Toshiba External Hard Drive Is Detected But Not Showing Files

If you find your Toshiba disk isn't showing any files, you can refer to the article about 'pen drive not showing data' to make your files show up again.

Situation 5. Toshiba External Hard Drive Light Blinking But Not Working

This is a common issue that happens to external hard drives from all the brands including Toshiba, Seagate, Samsung, and more. The solutions to 'Toshiba external hard drive not working' in such a case are the same as the ones to 'Seagate external hard drive light blinking but not working', regardless of the brands.

Other Fixes for Toshiba External Hard Drive Not Working

In addition to the commonest cases, there are other situations in which your Toshiba external hard drive is not working properly. Thus, there are other tips worth trying if the methods above fail to bring your device back to normal.

Fix 1: Check Power Management for USB Hub

• Click Start, type: devmgmt.msc, and hit Enter.
• Open Device Manager and expand 'Universal Serial Bus controllers'.
• Right-click on theUSB Root Hub, click on'Properties'.
• Go to Power Management and uncheck'Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power'.

If this doesn't work, try Fix 2.

Fix 2: Reboot PC into Safe Mode

In order to thoroughly check out and find the exact problem, you can try to reboot the PC into Safe Mode to see where Toshiba external hard drive can work or not:

External Hard Disk Connected But Not Showing Data

• Go toSettings, click on 'Update & security'.
• Tab on 'Recovery', select'Advanced Startup'and click 'Restart now'.
• PC will automatically boot into another Startup Settings screen, pressF4to initiate PC reboot into Safe Mode.
• Then check whether the Toshiba external hard disk can be detected or not.

If not, don't worry. Effective fixes and solutions are available to help to fix Toshiba external hard drive not working issue right now.

Disk check can effectively fix and repair some internal errors on your storage devices, even including the hard disk drive not working issue. Here you have two options to get this issue fixed:

Fix 3. Fix Toshiba External Hard Drive Not Working with Free Partition Manager

Step 1. Launch EaseUS Partition Master Free and right-click the partition that you want to check by clicking 'Check File System'.

Step 2. Click 'Start' to continue and let this program check and fix all found errors on the Toshiba external hard drive.

External Hard Drive Not Showing Up Windows

3. Click Finish to complete the process.

Fix 4. Fix Toshiba External Hard Drive Not Working by Running CMD

• Press 'Win + R'to open Run dialog and type cmd to open Command Prompt by hitting 'Enter'.
• Type chkdsk /f c: ('C' is the drive letter of your Toshiba external hard drive) and hit 'Enter' to run the disk check process.
• Type exit to finish the process when the disk check process is finished.

Then you can check to see whether this has worked to repair your Toshiba external hard drive or not.

If you don't have any technical know-how and want to minimize data risks, using third-party software could be a better choice. The Command line is suitable for computer professionals since wrong commands can cause severe problems. Therefore, we strongly recommend you try an automatic command line alternative.

EaseUS Tools M is a practical computer fixing tool that is safe and light-weighted. It's a perfect alternative to CHKDSK command. Use this one-click tool to solve your computer issues.

To fix file system error or disk error:

Step 1: DOWNLOAD EaseUS Tools M for Free and install it.

Step 2: Open the software and select the 'File showing' option.

Step 3: Choose the drive and wait for repairing. After the operation completes, click the 'View' button to check the drive.

• Click on Start and type devmgmt.msc to open Device Manager by hitting Enter.
• Expand'Universal Serial Universal Serial Bus controllers', right-click every USB device found there, and select 'Uninstall'.

Then check out whether any device shows up as unrecognized or not:

• If the Toshiba external hard drive shows as unrecognized, go to the driver's tab and delete/uninstall the driver. Then check out whether the external hard drive shows up in My Computer/My PC or not.
• If it doesn't show up, reboot or restart the PC.
• If it shows up but disappears later, repeat the above steps and go to Disk Management, change the drive letter of your Toshiba external hard drive and reconnect it to PC to let the PC detect it again.

The Botton Line

When your Toshiba external hard drive is not working, figure out the specific situation and then follow the corresponding solutions to fix it, which is more time-consuming than trying the tips one by one. If none of the fixes help to fix 'Toshiba hard drive not working', other than sending the device for manual repair, you can also get it replaced if it is still under warranty.