

At this time, you should assign a drive letter.

When the external has no drive letter, it will be invisible in File Explorer. Assign a drive letter to the external hard drive When the hard drive doesn't appear in Windows 10 File Explorer but in Disk Management, you can try the following 3 methods. External hard drive not showing up in Windows 10 Explorer but in Disk Management And you can take according solutions if it is showing up in Windows 10 Disk Management or not appearing in Disk Management. If your external hard drive (portable hard drive) won't show in Windows 10 Explorer as well, the following steps will guide you to solve the issue and make the external drive appears.įirst of all, let’s open Disk Management to see the condition of this hard drive (Press “ Window s”+ “ R”, type “diskmgmt.msc” and hit “ Enter”, you will access the Disk Management interface). Solutions for external hard drive not showing up in Windows 10/11 Then, you won’t be able to open it to use the files stored on it. However, it is possible that the external hard drive not showing up in Windows 10/11 File Explorer or “This PC”. In most cases, an external hard drive or the second hard drive will present automatically after being connected to your computer. With large capacity, an external hard drive, also called a portable hard drive, is always used to store or back up data. But don't do that yet if you want to recover any data.External hard drive not showing up in Windows 10/11 Recovering the drive capacity should be just a re-partition (new GPT/MBR) & re-format away. Recovered files might not have their original names or be in the any directory trees, but at least you can get some of the data back.

Or if TestDisk fails, you can always read the whole drive directly, looking for files to piece back together with PhotoRec. There's good documentation at the link above, including a Step by Step guide. Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy. TestDisk is powerful free data recovery software! It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software: certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table). Recovering at least some of the old data should be possible, a recovery program like TestDisk, it tries to do things like: What's on the external hard drive now? If it's only the Windows installation data, then I'm assuming you wrote to the external hard drive instead of another USB drive (or you intended to do that.).Īnyway, as long as you've only overwritten 30GB out of 1024GB hard drive, then there should still be about 994GB of the old data still there.
