![]() What size of external drive is best? That depends on you. You also don’t want to pay through the nose for a drive you’ll never even come close to filling. It does no good to buy a high-speed device with encryption and remote access if it’s not big enough to store all your data. If that's the case, check out our picks for the best portable drives available in the market.Arguably the most essential specification to consider when buying an external drive is storage space. If the external drive still doesn't show up on your computer, you're probably dealing with a broken drive, and you should consider getting a new one. (You can always use OneDrive or File History to back up your data.) As such, you should consider this as a reminder to keep an updated backup of your files. If the drive works after trying these instructions, that's good but remember that drives fail quite often. Wrapping things upĪlthough there are a lot of factors that could prevent an external drive from being detected, these solutions should help fix the most common problems. Once you've completed these steps, Windows 10 should detect and configure the drive automatically. Disconnect the removable drive from your device.Right-click the external drive with the problem and click the Update driver option. ![]() Search for Device Manager and click the top result to open the experience.To install the latest driver, use these steps: If Device Manager shows a yellow or red mark on the external drive, it's likely that this is a driver problem. You can install the most up-to-date driver available, or you can reinstall the same driver to see if it helps the computer detect the drive. You can troubleshoot and fix this problem in at least two ways. When the drive isn't available on your computer, it could also be a driver issue. In the case that you already tried the recommendations to address connection, initialization, and formatting issues, it could mean hardware failure, in which case you should consider getting a new drive. If Windows 10 doesn't detect the drive correctly, and it appears in Disk Management with the Unreadable status, you're experiencing read and write errors, corruption, or hardware failure. If you can't get the storage online, and it was recently available, that could mean the drive is corrupted, disconnected, or it's not getting power. Right-click the drive with the unsupported file system, and select the Format option.Īfter completing the steps, you should be able to start using the storage as usual.To format a drive with a supported file system, use these steps: If you have any data that you want to keep, make sure to connect it to a supported device, extract the data, and only then continue with the steps below. Warning: Using this process will erase everything on the drive. In this case, the solution is to format the drive using a supported file system. If you're connecting a drive formatted using a different OS (macOS or Linux) with an unsupported file system, it won't appear on your computer. Windows 10 only recognizes drives using a supported file system (NTFS, FAT32, exFAT, or ReFS). Fixing drive with an unsupported file system Once you complete the steps, the system will proceed to create a new volume with a partition and a drive letter. If the drive is trying to use an existing drive letter, right-click the volume and select the Change Drive Letter and Paths option.Click on the top result to open Disk Management.Search for Create and format hard disk partitions.If you know that the drive is working correctly, but it won't show up in File Explorer, the drive could be trying to use a letter already in use by another device or the drive letter may be missing.Ī drive letter conflict is a common problem with removable devices, and you can fix this issue with these steps: You can try resetting the connection by shutting down your computer and unplugging the external drive, then after one minute, turn on your computer and reconnect the drive.Īlternatively, you can try connecting the drive to a different computer, but if this isn't working, there's a good chance the drive or controller is dead. If you've already tried the above recommendations, and you're still unable to use the drive. You can quickly find out if there's a port problem by unplugging the drive and using a different port on the same or another computer. It can also be the case that the problem is a dead USB port on your computer.
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