External Hard Drive not being detected?

[Nick]

My sister wanted to use her external hard drive for the first time to put a bunch of pictures on it, so I connected it to her Microsoft Surface Pro 4 and tried to give it a good ol’ format. When it was in the middle of that format, the computer froze up and I had no choice but to force reboot it. Since then, if you connect the drive to any computer, it goes through a weird cycle of Windows’ device connected and device disconnected system sounds, but it doesn’t show up at all under disk management, device manager, or Windows explorer. However, when I click the logo on the taskbar that you click when you want to eject a device, it shows the device there as an “Elements 10B8” which would be her drive. Because of the issue occurring (I’m guessing) when I was trying to format it at first, I booted up my main system into GParted live with her drive connected to see if I could reformat it from there. It showed some error that I forget when it was searching for drives, and then the only drives that showed up in GParted were my system’s boot drive, data drive, and backup drive, but not her external drive. I’m out of ideas. Does anyone know how to fix this, or is this drive a lost cause? There was nothing on it, thankfully, but I’d hate to lost a perfectly good WD external drive.

[jmarket]

If you have a good working non vintage PC available, plug the drive into it, got to control panel, administrative tools, computer management, disk management, and take a screenshot of the external drive if it displays there and post it here.

[Bastet]

Have you checked to see if the drive is visible under diskpart?
Cmd prompt w/admin or powershell w/admin diskpart>list disk if it is seen make a mental note of the disk number & follow on from list disk with select disk # with # being the number of your troublesome disk, once disk is selected clean it with the clean all command.

[Nick]

If you have a good working non vintage PC available, plug the drive into it, got to control panel, administrative tools, computer management, disk management, and take a screenshot of the external drive if it displays there and post it here.

but it doesn’t show up at all under disk management, device manager, or Windows explorer.

Have you checked to see if the drive is visible under diskpart?
Cmd prompt w/admin or powershell w/admin diskpart>list disk if it is seen make a mental note of the disk number & follow on from list disk with select disk # with # being the number of your troublesome disk, once disk is selected clean it with the clean all command.

I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, but diskpart>list disk while running cmd as admin, it just returns to C:\WINDOWS\system32 without showing any results. If I put diskpart>listdisk as all one word like that, the little line just blinks and nothing happens.

Anyway, I connected it to my laptop and it actually read it and detected it fine, but when I went to format it like I’ve been trying to do this whole time, it just freezes and I have to force stop the format after the formatting window stops responding.

[Rustys]

Anyway, I connected it to my laptop and it actually read it and detected it fine, but when I went to format it like I’ve been trying to do this whole time, it just freezes and I have to force stop the format after the formatting window stops responding.

The drive should of been formated and ready to use.

Here are the steps to use Disk Part so you have them.

From the command prompt type diskpart

Now the command prompt should show as
diskpart>

Type List Disk

Use the number that is associated to the USB drive and type Select Disk #(replace # with the number)

I usually check to make sure the correct drive is selected by typing List Disk again. (There should be an * near the disk that is selected).

If it is the correct disk then type Clean
(You can use the Clean all command which will zero out the drive and can take several hours)

Once complete type Exit

Eject the drive the usual way and then reconnect it allowing the system to recognize the drive and see if you can see it in Disk Management and see if you can format it form there as well.

[Nick]

I tried that, it was only detecting the SSD in my laptop and was reporting the wrong free space (I have 106gb of space available on my SSD?..)

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.15063]
(c) 2017 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\WINDOWS\system32>diskpart

Microsoft DiskPart version 10.0.15063.0

Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation.
On computer: (name removed)

DISKPART> List Disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
[HR][/HR]
Disk 0 Online 232 GB 399 MB *

DISKPART> List Disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
[HR][/HR]
Disk 0 Online 232 GB 399 MB *

DISKPART> List Disk

Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
[HR][/HR]
Disk 0 Online 232 GB 399 MB *

DISKPART>

As you can see, I tried it 3 differnt times with 1 time connecting to a USB 2.0 port instead of USB 3.0. Also, all of those 3 times, it didn’t show up in Windows Explorer like it for some reason did the last time I posted in this thread.

[Rustys]

Type rescan with the USB drive connected so it should pick up the drive.

You stated once I believe that you had a Linux disk?
Which one and what version?

Edit: Is it still not or is it now showing in Drive Management?

[veeg]

Any updates for us?

[jmarket]

@Nick do you require further help here? This thread will be closed within 48 hours. If you still require help after it is closed please contact a staff member.

[Nick]

It looks to me as if this is a lost cause. Thanks for your guys’ help anyway.