External drives — either USB flash drives or external hard drives —
should be easy to use. In some cases, you may connect your drive to a
Windows PC or another device with a USB port and find that it's not
recognized. This problem can be caused by partition issues on your
external drive, using the wrong file system, dead USB ports, driver
issues in Windows, or other problems. In a worst case scenario, the
drive itself may simply be dead.
The steps below will be the same for both USB flash drives and larger external hard drives, which work similarly.
Does the drive show up in disk management?
First, let's check whether Windows detects the drive when you plug it
in. Plug your removable drive into your computer. If it's an external
hard drive, you may have to flip a power switch on the hard drive to
activate it. Some heavy-duty removable hard drives may even have to be
plugged in with a separate power cable before they'll work.
Next, open the Disk Management tool. To do so, press Windows Key + R, type diskmgmt.msc into the Run dialog, and press Enter.
You should see your external drive listed in the Disk Management window.
Even if it doesn't appear in your Computer window because it doesn't
contain any partitions, it should show up here.
If you do see the drive here, you can continue to the last section where
we'll format it properly so Windows or your other devices can access
and recognize it.If you don't see the drive here, continue to the next
section where we'll try to determine why your drive isn't recognized.
Making Windows recognize the drive
If Windows doesn't see your drive at all, it's possible there's a
hardware issue with your computer's USB port, a driver problem with your
Windows computer, or you may just have a dead drive.
First, unplug the drive from your USB port and try plugging it into
another USB port on your computer. If it works in one USB port but not
another, you may have a dead USB port. If you've plugged the drive into a
USB hub, try connecting it to the computer instead. Some USB hubs won't
provide enough power for your external drive to function.
If the drive doesn't show up in Disk Management even after you skip the
USB hub and connect it to another USB port on your computer, it's tough
to know for certain whether the drive itself is bad or the computer is
having a problem. If you have another computer nearby, try plugging the
drive in there to check whether it's detected. If the drive doesn't work
on any computer you plug it into — be sure to check whether it appears
in the computer's Disk Management window — the drive itself is likely
dead and will need to be replaced.
If the drive does work on other computers — or you don't have another
computer around to test this with — Windows may be having a driver
problem with the drive. You can check for this using the Device
Manager.
To open it, press Windows Key + R, type "devmgmt.msc" into the Run dialog, and press Enter.
Look under Disk drives and check for any devices with a yellow
exclamation mark next to them. If you see a yellow exclamation mark, you
have a driver problem. Right-click the device with a yellow exclamation
mark, select Properties, and look at the error message. This error
message can help you fix the problem — you may want to perform a Google
search for the error message you find.
Such problems can be tricky to fix. If the problem started recently, you
may want to run System Restore. You may want to use the Update Driver
button to install an updated driver, use the Roll Back Driver button to
revert any changes, or use the Uninstall button to uninstall the device
from your system and hope that Windows will reinstall the driver and
configure it correctly when you reconnect the drive.
Partitioning and formatting the drive
We can use the Windows Disk Management tool to fix partition and file
system issues with the drive. If you see that the drive is unpartitioned
and is full of "unallocated space," you'll want to create a new
partition on it. This will allow Windows and other operating systems to
use it.
To do so, right-click inside the unallocated space, select New Simple
Volume, and go through the wizard to create a new partition.
If your drive is partitioned and you still can't see it, ensure you've
set a drive letter so you can access it in Windows. This should happen
automatically, but if you've manually unset the drive letter, the drive
may not show up and be accessible in Windows.
To do this, right-click the removable drive's partition, select Change
Drive Letter and Paths, and add a drive letter. For example, add the
letter G: and the removable drive will be accessible at drive G.
If the drive does appear to be partitioned, it may be partitioned with
the wrong file system. For example, you may have formatted the drive
with the ext4 file system from Linux or the HFS Plus file system from a
Mac. Windows can't read these file systems. Reformat the drive with the
newer NTFS file system or older FAT32 file system so Windows will be
able to recognize it.
To reformat a partition, right-click it, select Format, and select your desired file system.
Note that this will erase all the files on your drive, so you'll want to
copy any important files off of it first — for example, if you
formatted the drive on a Linux or Mac computer, take it back to a
computer running Linux or Mac and copy your important files off of it
before continuing.
If you can't access the drive from another device, such as a DVD player,
smart TV, game console, or media center device, it may be formatted as
NTFS. Many devices, even Microsoft's own Xbox 360, can't read the
Windows NTFS file system. They can only access drives formatted with the
older FAT32 file system. To fix this problem, simply reformat the NTFS
partition as FAT32. The drive should then be recognized by other devices
when you connect it to them.
Note that this process will erase the files on your external drive. Copy
the files off the drive to back them up first, if
necessary.format-removable-drive-as-fat32Following this process should
solve most of the disk recognition issues you'll encounter. If a drive
isn't recognized by any computer you connect it to and never shows up in
the Disk Management window, it's probably dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Hmmmmm... what are you thinking? Do not forget to comment,It helps us to improve this blog and help us to make better. on