Detect external hard drive vista

I still cant seem to find it or access all the files on it that I need If not, r. If the option is not there it may need formatting first. Scummy's suggestion. Disk Management.? If the drive is not present in the Disk Management window or if you are not able to access it, then the drive may have failed. In this window you should see all of your connected physical drives, their format, if they are healthy, and the drive letter. Change the drive letter of the drive.

Right-click on the drive in the list, and from the resulting menu select "Change Drive Letters and Paths" Click on Change so you can change the drive letter. Click Change. Select a new drive letter from the drop down list, preferably the one that is not normally used for this drive. Click Yes on the confirmation screen and you are done. Caution: The cause of unpredictable behavior in a USB drive is often found to be the incorrect removal of a previously connected USB device.

When removing USB devices right click on the? Safely Remove Hardware? This is usually found in the bottom right hand corner of the monitor. Once you have clicked on the icon, a menu with a single selection should appear. Click again on that selection to see the? You'll need to download Vista-specific drivers.

If this is not the case, do your USB ports on Vista work with anything else? I had this same problem. After 2 days of searching found info that may help. You have to delete some file and presto it should work.

Apparently there is some bug with Vista where you can get a corrupt driver cache file and if you delete it then it will solve all these problems. I discovered this on a newsgroup post. I have been searching a way to get my Vista to read my USB flash dirve.

Then thoght, duh, why don't I check TechRepublic for possible solutions. Your response still works today. I tried it, it worked. I've been dealing with this problem for months and couldn't find a fix.

Worked beautifully!!!! Suddenly I wondered if I needed to set the device to share on the XP computer before the Vista computer would see it. Yep - that was it! Many people said they can't find external hard drive on the computer computer doesn't find external hard drive.

If you also encounter the portable hard drive not showing up external HDD not showing up on Windows 10 or other Windows systems, please change a USB port, check in Disk Management, run troubleshooter, update driver, etc.

Is your external drive not showing up? There are many useful workarounds for fixing the external hard drive not being detected in Windows 10 how to repair hard disk not detected in Windows 7 is basically the same. I tried a different USB port and it worked. Besides, you should try to connect the external hard drive directly to your PC and see whether your computer can detect the USB drive. In this case, I advise you not to use USB hubs because some of them are not able to provide enough power supply to the external hard drive.

Sometimes, an external hard drive not showing in my computer Windows Explorer could appear in Disk Management. How to open Disk Management:. Another way to make the unrecognized or undetectable WD external hard drive WD Elements show up on your PC is to change the drive letter. Do you want to recover your files from external hard drive not detected?

If yes, please read the following tutorial. Then, connect your external hard drive to PC. Free Download. Step 2 : shift to the Devices tab at the top and move your cursor to the target external hard drive.

Step 3 : click on the Scan button to scan the selected external hard drive. Step 4 : browse the scan results during the scan. Alternatively, you can wait until the end of the scan and then select the files you want to restore.

Step 5 : press the Save button and choose another drive with enough free space to store the recovered files. Step 6 : press the OK button to confirm the selection and start external hard drive file recovery. Please read this page if your external hard drive seems dead and you need to recover important data from it:. If you are stuck in finding ways to recover files from dead external hard drive efficiently, this passage will be very helpful. Click to tweet. If you find your Toshiba external hard drive not showing up on PC showing as unrecognized , you can open Device Manager to uninstall or delete the driver.

Also, you should open Device Manager using the above method or other ways you like. Then, finish the following steps. Sometimes, you may find your hard disk not detected in BIOS.

As for how to recover data from undetected internal hard disk step by step, please read:. If your PC is attacked by virus, unfortunately, any external hard drive connected to this PC will be affected.

The virus may cause the external hard drive not showing issue. Please run anti-virus software to kill the virus and get Windows 10 to recognize your external hard drive. To recover data from virus infected external hard drive, you can try using MiniTool Power Data Recovery because of its excellent performance, high security, and simple operations.