External Drive Not Showing

Apreciar

I have a Hitachi Deskstar sata drive in an external caddie (Integra). I use this drive to back-up with Macrium and for data, music and picture files. When I plug it into my USB port I cannot find a trce of it in Windows Explorer, the drive is spinning and I get an icon in my system tray. Anyoneone know how to correct this problem.

Sublime_2

Are you running Windows? If so, try Microsoft FixIt troubleshooter. It has helped me out in the past, when I couldn't find my cd/dvd drive.

Apreciar

Notyhing to help on the Fixit site. I have tried to connect the drive to my laptop and my desktop, neither recognises the drive.
Could it be the drive itself, it is not old probably 14 months but not used much.

kwikbreaks

Try right click on My Computer and select Disk Management. It may show in there.

I had this with an external drive some time back and was able the fix it using http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download (it seems it was a corrupted partition table).

I felt very proud of myself. I had found during research that there was a newer firmware for this particular drive so I decided to update it as that may have caused it. Unfortunately that bricked the damned thing so I had to get the drive itself out from the housing to access the data using a different drive caddy. If you can't fix yours then taking the drive out and either trying it in a desktop as an extra drive or in another drive caddy may allow you to get the data back.

Apreciar

The problem is that the drive is not showing anywhere.

kwikbreaks

In that case your only option is to take the drive out of the caddy and hope it was the caddy busted rather than the drive.

espresso

Apreciar wrote: »

The problem is that the drive is not showing anywhere.

Try removing the drive from the caddy and then refitting it as I have experienced problems with SATA connectors.

Sublime_2

This might help, as its a similar problem with an external hitachi hard drive. If you scroll down the page the final reply seems to be your best bet.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/hitachi-external-hard-disk-not-detected-on-windows/0569c615-0c6e-44cf-bb35-808ed911946c

Sublime_2

Did it work?