Windows 10: external hard drive formatted now invisible on laptop

Hi, I fitted the hard drive from my old PC into an external enclosure. I plugged it into my Win 10 Laptop and backed up some files I wanted to keep, so far so good. I now want to use the drive as a backup for the Laptop so I formatted the drive using Macrorit disk partition expert. The drive is still running as before but now its completely invisible on the Laptop and the Macrorit software,

Is it possible to fix this and make the drive visible again?, thanks for any advice guys.
regards, ron

:)

 

i can't see my external hard drive 'WD My PassPort' ,, help me please

i can't see my external hard drive 'WD My PassPort' and before that there is message appear from windows microsoft ask me to format drive to can open it but i don't make format i just try to use "testdisk" to fix the problem but i can't and now i can't
see my hard drive on my laptop and i try to open it in another laptop but can't see it ,, all my work on this external hard please help me .

 

External Hard Drive Connection after Dish transfer

I used my external hard drives to transfer movies between Dish receivers. I know it reformatted the drive to do this. Now when I reconnect to my Windows laptop I cannot see it in File Explorer. Is my external hard drive now Dish only? How do I get
it back to Windows format?

 

Hi ronfrew.

If you right click Start, click Disk Management is the drive there?

Ken

 

Hi Ken,

Just checked the Disk Management and the drive is not shown.

regards,ron

 

Have you tried reseating cables.

Can you see disk or volume with diskpart?

 

as well do you have another machine you can connect to?

 

HI Ken,

I discovered Diskpart was not on my Laptop so I installed and ran it, and it does in fact find and identify the External Drive as DISK 1.
Next I ran the Disk Management program again and is now showing the Drive as DISK 1 BASIC ONLINE 232.88 GB UNALLOCATED. Is the Drive now ready to be used Ken or do I need install partitions or something first.

regards, ron

 

If you right click in the area where it says Unallocated it should give you the option to create a simple volume. You can make it one big partition or ......

If you don't get the option to create simple volume then in left column where it says Disk 1 right click and initialize.

Then create one simple volume or .....

 

If diskpart was not on your laptop, you've got some big problems. And it would be interesting to know where you installed it from. Diskpart is one of the very base commands included with Windows.

 

Was anything in a RAID configuration?
Does the bios recognize the drive?

There are 4 places to check the drive:
1) BIOS
2) Disk management
3) Device manager
4) File explorer

What do you see with each of the above?

And what do you see when the drive is returned to the original PC?

 

Hi, I have now created a simple volume on the drive which is great, I have a stack of photos I want to back up. Being a fully paid up member of the novice club I thought Diskpart was a program I needed to download as I didn't find it on my laptop. So I Googled it and found it on the Softpedia website and downloaded it from there. I would like to thank Ken and everyone who posted helpful advice, This is an excellent Forum and source of information for Windows 10 users I must say.

regards, ron

 

Cool. Please don't leave drive on and connected 7/24. To be a real backup it needs to be disconnected and located somewhere away from device.

Ken