Windows 10: External hard drive not visible

My best guess is that the drive in question does not now have a drive letter allocated. Had this yesterday - plug it in and no ding dongs and not seen in Explorer. And the error from network is probably because it can't be found.

It can happen when another device gets given the drive letter. For drives like your files drive , and backup drives, it is a good idea to give them a drive letter well away from the range that windows uses. I use U and V, for example.

Your Disk Management screen shot showed a Drive 7 but we couldn't see it. That wouldn't have been your missing drive would it?? If so, and it has no drive letter, give it one e.g. U.

Otherwise, don't know!!!!! At least it will only take a minute or so to check the drive letter hunch.

 

If it is a USB device, the registry can hold on to the old hardware info and not flush it out when you keep connecting it. You are best to either replace with a NAS or leave connected.

 

The drive you can't see on the screenshot is another external harddrive (F) drive 7 on the disk management screenshot.
The drive that now can't be seen (G) drive was always plugged in. That way when I download something new, I transfer it across from my downloads folder onto the G drive without having to connect and disconnect it all the time, then we just stream it via our home wifi using the media players.
I'm not sure how a NAS works but surely it must be more complicated than that, not to mention more expensive, as I would surely need to purchase additional hardware and then connect and disconnect it to my PC.

So, assuming the drive now has no letter allocated to it, how do I solve that issue. A step by step guide would be really useful, unfortunately I'm not great with this sort of thing but I can follow instructions if they are straightforward. Thanks again for your help and patience with this matter.

 

Hi,
Try expanding USB Controllers in Device manager and see whether any unrecognised devices listed, if you have any, right click it, go to driver tab and uninstall the driver and reboot.

 

If it has no drive letter it will still show up in Disk Manager so something else is astray.

 

An update, I have been away for a couple of nights, my pc has been switched off at the plug socket whilst I was away. Got home today, turned on the pc and my hard drive is visible and accessible again. I have no explanation for this but my issue is now solved. Thanks for all you guys trying to help me with this problem and I'm sorry I can't explain how my problem was solved.

 

Good result.

I am annoyed with myself as I have heard of this a longish time ago. The remedy, then, with a bad USB connection, was to pull the power cord out overnight as I recall. This drains the mobo capacitors and gets the USB sockets working again.