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Computer Data Recovery – Hard Drive Not Showing in PC

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In this blog I explain a common Computer Data Recovery problem that many PC users find themselves plagued with.

The hard drive is not showing up in “My Computer” or in Windows Explorer (not to be confused with internet explorer).

Generally, I get phone calls where the customer states that the computer is no longer seeing their hard drive.

Computer Data Recovery No Drive Letter

I always try to ascertain if that is actually what is occurring or if it is more that the drive no longer has a drive letter attached to it.

If you click on your Windows start button and then look for “Computer”, right click on it and then click on manage.

open-disk-manager-windows-7

A program should open called Computer Management.

computer-management-console

Click on “Disk Management” under the Storage heading.

This will open up an area that will allow you to see all the mass storage devices connected to your computer.

Computer Data Recovery Disk Manager

In the disk manager you can see both the physical and the logical hard drives connected to the computer. In the illustration above it is clear that we have 3 physical drives connected to the machine. Disk 0 is the drive not showing up in my computer. You can see that this is because Windows is reporting it as unallocated space.

This would be caused by the Master Boot Record (MBR or Partition Sector) being bad or corrupt. It is great news that it is showing up because now I can try computer data recovery software to recover it.

I recommend a few different options:

  1.  You can download our Windows Surface Scanner which is free and run it to see if the drive has any bad sectors. If it does this means the drive has physical damage and you should try cloning it off with a forensic cloner like Speed Clone. If cloning does not work then I would suggest calling a hard drive recovery company like ours. If you do not have any bad sectors then move to option 2.
  2.  Download the Recover It All Now data recovery software and run the demo. This software will also give you a bad sector count, if you get a lot of bad sectors it is advisable to clone the drive before going any further. If there is no bad sectors then I would just continue the scans, make sure you are seeing your data and if so purchase Recover It All.

Now if the drive is not showing up in the disk manager, then at this point if the drive is in an enclosure you should try to remove it from the enclosure. NOTE: In most cases this will void the manufacturer warranty. If the drive is not in an enclosure (external hard drive) then your best bet is going to be to call a data recovery company like DTI Data Recovery.

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90 Responses to “Computer Data Recovery – Hard Drive Not Showing in PC”

  1. you inspired me April 5, 2012 3:27 am #

    this helped me lot to solve my problem

  2. Paul May 25, 2012 12:05 pm #

    Will this process work on sd cards (microSD) as well or is the software made for only hard drives?

    • David Mohyla May 31, 2012 8:56 am #

      Hi Paul,
      If your card is indicating it needs to be formatted etc… Yes, you can try the same process.

    • David Mohyla May 31, 2012 1:08 pm #

      Yes, it should work for cards that are connected via a card reader or plugged directly into the computer. Additionally, your card should be a FAT file system.

  3. Sam July 17, 2012 5:45 am #

    What if the External Hard Drive doesn’t show up on the Disk Management?

  4. Keila Te Moananui August 20, 2012 10:46 pm #

    hi there my external hard drive is not coming up in “my computer” or in disk management yet my computer says device is installed and all ready to use?

    • Jacqui Best March 20, 2014 12:38 pm #

      Keila,
      What kind of device is it saying its installing sometimes it just ads a USB unknown device and that would not be good. I would try putting the device in a different USB port and if that doeskin work try another machine. If all else fails pull the drive from the current enclosure and install in a new one.

  5. Anonymous November 1, 2012 11:20 am #

    please help me. i am beginner. my office computer went black and not opening. the service person says hard disk corrupted. how to find it is correct

    • David Mohyla November 1, 2012 11:28 am #

      We will be happy to help you with your hard drive recovery. However, we will need some details. Please provide as many as possible or contact us.

      • hafeez February 16, 2013 4:57 am #

        i have a laptop i am formatting it with xp cd. after some time the display showing hard drive is not found,and showing only one on screen f3=exit.. please how to slove this problem.

        • David Mohyla February 18, 2013 1:52 pm #

          There should be an option to go into Setup or into the BIOS. I would check and make sure the system is detecting your hard drive.

  6. Trigga November 6, 2012 4:44 pm #

    I have 2 laptop harddrives that I installed operating systems on and they worked for a couple of boots. They now give a msg saying missing operating system and when I view them in easeus partion software it comes up that the harddrives are no longer partitioned. Could you tell me what would possibly be causing these harddrives to lose thier partitions. TIA

    • David Mohyla November 15, 2012 11:42 am #

      Hi, that would be a very speculative answer. However, you can use Win Hex and our tutorials to find out what is missing or wrong with the drive.

  7. Melinda November 15, 2012 4:41 pm #

    Hello,
    I am trying to retrieve files from the hard drive in my desktop.I have the hard drive connected via SATA/USB Cable. It doesn’t show up in My Computer, however when I go to Disk Management, a box pops up asking me to initialize the Disk. Do I choose the MBR or the GPT option? I just want my files, photos and music that is on that hard drive.
    Thank you

    • David Mohyla November 20, 2012 12:14 pm #

      Your should run data recovery software to recover the data on the hard drive. I would not format nor initialize the drive.

  8. Jim December 27, 2012 6:26 am #

    Greetings,
    Having an issue closely related to this post –
    On a windows vista machine (HP TouchSmart) the C: is showing up in “Windows Explorer” but shows it as being “6.0 GB of 6.0 GB” full; this is a 500 GB Drive. Vista was locking up at every turn. I yanked the HD from the box and put it into a working XP machine and showed the same stuff in “Explorer”; however, it shows the correct info in Disk Manager (and in BIOS for that matter). I’ve run the Seagate tool package, which says the drive fails a key test, so I’m now trying to just clone it to get the important data off of it – this hasn’t been working so well. I’ve even run chkdisk – it never completes. I think the drive might be failing, but I’m really hoping it’s not some sort of dirty virus. Many apologies for the long post.
    Any guidance is much appreciated.

    • David Mohyla December 27, 2012 11:09 am #

      Hi Jim,
      Unfortunately, this is not a virus. Cloning a drive sector by sector would not be a problem if it were a virus, nor would check disk fail to complete. This is your hard drive failing.
      Sorry,

      • Jim December 27, 2012 5:47 pm #

        Thanks for the reply David. Just wanted to check if these symptoms indicated some obscure virus before I play with the HD in another machine and possibly infect it.

  9. Tim January 4, 2013 12:16 pm #

    Hi I have a gateway gt5465e when I try to install a 3rd hdd it doesn’t show up I know that the hdd is in working order and that it will show up if i disconnect my 2nd drive but will not show up in bios as a 3rd drive either what could the problem be I have 4 sata ports on my mobo and an ide port the IDE runs my dvd-r and nothing else

    • David Mohyla January 8, 2013 1:09 pm #

      When you say it doesn’t show up are you saying Windows does not see the drive or the system BIOS does not recognize it? Check Disk Management in Windows to see if the drive itself is being seen.

  10. Josh Mills January 15, 2013 6:44 am #

    Hi, I’ve got a PC running Windows 8. Have attached an external hard drive that is formatted for a Mac. I have a program that I was hoping could read it – HFSExplorer. But the drive doesn’t appear under My Computer. Having run disk management I can see the drive there. It has 3 partitions, 2 Healthy 200mMB & 465GB and 1 Unallocated 128MB.
    There are files on the disk that I want to copy to the PC but I can’t find any way to access the drive.
    Any help or suggestions please?
    Thanks in advance…

    • David Mohyla January 15, 2013 2:08 pm #

      Hi Josh, try Mac Drive. Or, you can download a Mac Data recovery program that runs in windows.
      Good luck.

  11. suchismita January 30, 2013 11:24 am #

    hello’
    i have many doubts regarding no. of hdd connection.1.If 2hdd will be connected 2 a pc then whether we have 2 partition and format each hdd one by one?
    2.if both the hdd will b partitioned and formatted then what will be the total secondary storage?
    3.whether each hdd can have drive letter from c 2 z or both the hdd have drive letter from c 2 z combiningly?
    4.whether we can create maximum 4 partition on each hdd or 4 partition on both the hdd combiningly?
    5.can we istall same os on two drives?
    6.if two hdd has already formatted and both are installed with winxp.if i will connect both as master .then how it will work?how i can retrive data from secondary hdd to primary?
    7if in the previous question if both the hdd have different os then how it will work?how we will retrive data from both???

    plz reply soon………

    • David Mohyla January 30, 2013 12:16 pm #

      Hi, Well there was a lot there and I am not sure I understand all of the questions but I will try to answer. First, I don’t know if these drives are PATA or SATA. If they are PATA then you will need to jumper the drives to Master, Slave or Cable Select. Master would be the end of the IDE cable and Slave the inner connection. SATA is pretty much plug and play.
      To answer your questions do these drive need to be formatted; Yes, assuming they are not partitioned and formatted already.
      I am not sure how to answer your question about drive storage. The amount of storage would be the just less then the size of the drive. You could choose to SPAN these drives in Windows and make one large drive consisting of both drives. To answer your question about getting data from a boot drive that has XP and another that has another OS, I would need to know the OS. For example if the other drive had Mac OSX you could use Mac drive or some other Windows OSX reader to access data. Similarly, you could do the same for some other operating systems.
      I hope I was able to answer some of your questions.
      Good luck.

  12. Vivek February 5, 2013 6:14 am #

    David,
    Good posts in this site and it gives lot of ideas for affected people like me.
    I’ve an issue with my Seagate Expansion Portable 500GB
    I use to connect this with WD media player and watch movies.
    It’s been working well for past 1.5 years but week back, it reported “Format Not Recognized” while playing a movie.
    I switched off the player, removed the drive and connected to my machine.
    It did not boot up in my Win 7 32-bit machine and it did not show up in My Computer.
    Went to disk management, no drive there. After 30 minutes, drive comes comes there (in logic disks) in disk management area as “2048 GB Unallocated” with label as “disk0 Unknown”.

    What could be the problem here ? Is there any sector issue or head in the disk got struck or anything else?

    I tried all sorts of recovery options like FDisk till change of controller chip, but nothing worked.

    Please suggest me how to resolve this issue. At least i want the data of 360 GB back.

    Note: 1. When tried to initialize the disk, it said “Could not find the sector requested”.
    2. Sector view in Hex Editor said Sector 0 as Invalid Partition Table and Invalid Operating system
    3. When i tried Partition recovery options, drive stays read only.

    Please help and thanks in advance !
    Vivek

    • David Mohyla February 7, 2013 3:06 pm #

      Hi,
      Well your drive should appear in Disk Management much sooner then 30 minutes. It sounds as if the drive itself is failing to read.

  13. Chuck Kimmerle February 14, 2013 4:24 pm #

    Trying to recover portable USB HD but, while it shows up in disk mgmt as healthy drive (it is not), it does not appear in Surface Scanner or Recover It. C: and D: drives also do not appear. Windows 7. Ideas? Thanks.

    • David Mohyla February 18, 2013 1:51 pm #

      Does the full size of the drive appear in disk management?

  14. Saju Menon March 4, 2013 6:39 am #

    Hi There,

    Lots of useful information are there in this i should say.

    My problem is as follows: I have a 500 GB HDD and i used to watch movies stored in it and it acts as a backup for my digital files. I forgot to remove this once while shutting down and after that while switching on – the monitor was just blinking and I noticed that the HDD is still connected to teh desktop (my system is a win xp – dual core – 2 GB RAM – 320 GB HDD). I removed the HDD and the system got switched on. After that I could notice that the system is very slow in booting up. Does this happens if the system tried to boot up through the portable HDD drive? – what is the solution or how to increase teh booting speed to the normal one. Thanks in advance.

    • David Mohyla March 6, 2013 4:22 pm #

      Hi,
      I would think that you are booting slower because the Operating System is looking at another device and confirming it is safe to boot while it is attached. I do not think your system would be looking to boot from an external device as the primary OS. However, you can look in the BIOS and check your boot options.
      Good luck

  15. Jared Holmes March 11, 2013 9:02 am #

    Hello,
    Great page! I have an portable USB hard drive which has recently stopped showing up under My Computer, Disk Management. Under the Surface Scanner, it shows up as [USB Unknown 0.00 GB]. Windows XP. The drive makes half-hearted whirring noises when you plug it in, then stops. Any ideas? Thanks!

    • David Mohyla March 14, 2013 2:54 pm #

      Yes, it is physically damaged. If you want to get data from you will need to send it in.
      thanks.

  16. Achim Pulger March 12, 2013 7:38 pm #

    Hi All,

    as it seems that a lot of knowledge and experiences are present here, i would like to ask for help.

    I have a strange problem with two of nine disk in my desktop PC. 🙁

    The system was running since more than a year without any problem, but suddenly I get the following problem (OS Windows 7 Ultimate x64):
    Now two disk (each 1TB) are shown as not initialized and with wrong size (first as 500GB and second as 1.363GB) in the “Disk Manager”!
    What I did is that I rearranged the disk on the controller, but this should not cause a problem normally.

    I know that I used this disk in the past in a RAID (both in different ones), but this is long time ago and the disks working in this setup since a long time. The disks are OK, because I can use it normally (also show correct in the “Disk Manager”) on another Windows 7 and a Windows 8 instance installed on the same machine. Also under Linux it is shown correctly.

    When I start “Disk Management” it ask me to initialize the disk but fails with the error message “The system cannot find the file specified”. That makes a bit sense because the shown size is absolutely crap.
    They are also not shown as disk in the device manager but with the old RAID names.

    When I have a look on the disk with diskpart, it shows me that the disks are from type “RAID”.

    DISKPART> list disk

    Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
    ——– ————- ——- ——- — —
    Disk 0 Online 1863 GB 0 B
    * Disk 1 Online 500 GB 500 GB
    Disk 2 Online 1363 GB 1363 GB
    Disk 3 Online 931 GB 0 B
    Disk 4 Online 1863 GB 0 B
    Disk 5 Online 476 GB 0 B
    Disk 6 Online 238 GB 0 B
    Disk 7 Online 119 GB 8073 MB
    Disk 8 Online 238 GB 50 GB

    DISKPART> select disk 1
    Disk 1 is now the selected disk.

    DISKPART> attributes disk
    Current Read-only State : No
    Read-only : No
    Boot Disk : No
    Pagefile Disk : No
    Hibernation File Disk : No
    Crashdump Disk : No
    Clustered Disk : No

    DISKPART> detail disk
    System
    Disk ID: 00000000
    Type : RAID
    Status : Online
    Path : 0
    Target : 1
    LUN ID : 0
    Location Path : PCIROOT(0)#RAID(P00T01L00)
    Current Read-only State : No
    Read-only : No
    Boot Disk : No
    Pagefile Disk : No
    Hibernation File Disk : No
    Crashdump Disk : No
    Clustered Disk : No
    There are no volumes.

    When i do it on the second W7 instance they are shown as type SATA.

    DISKPART> list disk
    Disk ### Status Size Free Dyn Gpt
    ——– ————- ——- ——- — —
    Disk 0 Online 931 GB 0 B
    Disk 1 Online 1863 GB 1024 KB
    Disk 2 Online 931 GB 1024 KB
    Disk 3 Online 931 GB 1024 KB
    Disk 4 Online 1863 GB 1024 KB
    Disk 5 Online 476 GB 0 B
    Disk 6 Online 238 GB 0 B
    Disk 7 Online 119 GB 8073 MB
    Disk 8 Online 238 GB 50 GB

    DISKPART> select disk 2
    Disk 2 is now the selected disk.

    DISKPART> attributes disk
    Current Read-only State : No
    Read-only : No
    Boot Disk : No
    Pagefile Disk : No
    Hibernation File Disk : No
    Crashdump Disk : No
    Clustered Disk : No

    DISKPART> detail disk
    SAMSUNG HD103SJ ATA Device
    Disk ID: C152A635
    Type : SATA
    Status : Online
    Path : 1
    Target : 0
    LUN ID : 0
    Location Path : PCIROOT(0)#PCI(1F02)#ATA(C01T00L00)
    Current Read-only State : No
    Read-only : No
    Boot Disk : No
    Pagefile Disk : No
    Hibernation File Disk : No
    Crashdump Disk : No
    Clustered Disk : No
    Volume ### Ltr Label Fs Type Size Status Info
    ———- — ———– —– ———- ——- ——— ——–
    Volume 4 Y Data_Y1 NTFS Partition 931 GB Healthy

    The disk mapping is as follow:

    Corrupted Working
    Disk 1 Disk 2

    I tried to delete the disk in the registry from the HKLM/System/CurrentControlSet/Enum tree (from the other Instance and from installation CD (HKLM/System/ControlSet001/Enum)) but it always come back faulty after the reboot.

    I guess that the problem is anywhere in the registry. Do somebody knows where the links from the enum tree and the PnP stuff of windows are?
    For me it seems that W7 is always take an old configuration to initialize the disks.

    Thank You in advance
    Achim

  17. Fahad March 19, 2013 4:28 pm #

    Hi i have a Toshiba 1TB external drive that Windows 8 won’t see (neither from disk management, nor file explorer). The light is on when plugged and disk spins but nothing happens. How can i tel if the disk is damaged (new) or if it is a compatibility issue?

    Thanks

    • David Mohyla March 19, 2013 6:47 pm #

      Hi, Disk Management should be able to see all attached storage media. Do you see any error messages like “Windows could not install this device”?

  18. Pazzo April 14, 2013 6:51 am #

    I just got a new pc running windows 8. I installed a software and when I restarted the pc as requested, it could not boot to the desktop. I tried connecting the drive to another working pc as secondary, the working pc would not boot to the desktop, when i removed the secondary drive, the pc will boot to the desktop. I have formatted, delete and re-created a single partition hoping it would work so i can use file recovery to recover my files but it wouldn’t format either and it still does the same thing when I try to boot it as secondary drive with the working pc. I have very important files inside that i have to recover. I desperately need help.

    • David Mohyla April 16, 2013 10:23 am #

      Hi Pazzo, what did you format and create another partition on?

  19. Benjamin April 24, 2013 3:40 am #

    The data recovery tools you suggested aren’t doing it for me: surface scanner won’t populate a list of devices, and Recover it all I can’t get to detect anything either, which is weird since I can clearly see my device in the windows device manager and disk manager. whats going on?

    • David Mohyla April 26, 2013 2:26 pm #

      You may need to right click on the program icon and run them as an administrator.

      • Benjamin April 28, 2013 3:45 pm #

        Thanks for the response. So that helped me to run Surface Scan (haven’t tried the other program yet), however the result of my scan was kind of weird: each block produced the same error of “The media is write protected”. Hope there is still hope left for my files, and thanks for your time by the way!

        • Benjamin April 30, 2013 12:32 am #

          I also tried Recover It All now, which seemed to find no logical volumes with a deep scan. Please tell me there is still a way?

  20. Anonymous April 26, 2013 9:54 am #

    Great help thank you

  21. Avtar Singh May 1, 2013 9:33 am #

    Hello Sir ,
    I have hard drive .At night i shutdown my computer but next day when i on my pc MY harddrive does not work ,i show it to mechanics it change my harddrive card but it doesn’t work.please give me solution.
    Its compulsary

    Plzzzzz ……… help me
    its hitachi hard drive
    250 gb
    modal = HDP725025GLA380
    Plese help

  22. Sam May 28, 2013 7:02 pm #

    My Portable hard drive stopped working for no apparent reason.
    It is being recognized as a device, the light turns on and the “installing Device Drivers” popup runs along with the beeping noise but then it never shows up in My computer. It does show up in disk management as drive 1 but shows no information on space, partitions, format or allocations it just has drive 1 and then an empty grey box to the right of it.. I have Changed the reference letter to Z as shown in your instructions along with installing Surface scanner which doesn’t identify any portable drive, and neither does ‘Recover it all’. This drive has all my graphic design projects for University and i would hate to loose the files on it particularly as the semester ends in three weeks with all my assignment deadlines looming. I have read and attempted the fixes on many tech blogs but to no success. Any other suggestions?

    • David Mohyla May 30, 2013 1:22 pm #

      Sounds like the drive is not being detected. The drive may have failed. You could try taking the drive out of the enclosure to make sure the enclosure is not the problem.

  23. Mark June 13, 2013 10:37 am #

    Please help me guys. I have a samsung spinpoint hm121h1 sata hdd, and it placed in a enclosure. When I insert the USB connector on any computer, it doesn’t show up on MY COMPUTER and DISK MANAGEMENT. So I buy a new enclosure but it still doesn’t recognized but on the device manager [Disk Drives], there is a drive name “USB DEVICE”. I already search in the internet to find any drivers for my HDD but i cannot find any. Please help me

  24. Anonymous July 9, 2013 10:19 pm #

    Help! ‘DESKTOP’ is not showing up in ‘MY COMPUTER’. I rebooted with RESTART, then did a complete SHUTDOWN and started again. No difference. Where did it GO? Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

    • David Mohyla July 9, 2013 10:33 pm #

      Hi, if you are using Vista or Win 7 go to your C: drive. Navigate to Users. Find your profile and you should see your Desktop folder. If you are running XP navigate to Documents and Settings and find same.

  25. Anonymous August 1, 2013 12:11 pm #

    hi i need help..
    my netbook says “please reboot or choose proper disk drive” and then i remove my harddrive on it to recover my files, then i connected it on my desktop via ide/sata cable.but it doesn’t shows anything it failed to install the usb mask storage device,…what would i do to fix this problem?thank you in advance 🙂

    • David Mohyla August 6, 2013 12:56 pm #

      Does the drive show up in the system BIOS or in Disk Management? If not then the hard drive may be bad.

    • Jacqui Best October 16, 2013 3:54 pm #

      Anonymous,
      Did you slave it via IDE, SATA, or USB?

  26. Bill Morris September 23, 2013 2:55 pm #

    Surface scanner 2.10 does not allow me to mount a drive in Windows 7-x64. I re-installed it twice still nothing. When it loads nothing works except EXIT. Any ideas?

    • Bill Morris September 23, 2013 8:41 pm #

      Your software “Recover It All” does the same thing. No drives are shown. I am not having problems with the internal drive in the computer just a Seagate 1TB external drive as above.

    • Jacqui Best October 16, 2013 3:57 pm #

      Bill,
      Is the drive showing up in the disk manager? It maybe that the drive is not able to communicate with the machine. Is it showing up in the BIOS?

      Thanks

  27. Bill Morris September 24, 2013 10:14 pm #

    The drive is a iOmega Home Media Network Hard Drive (external). It is a1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11. In Admin tools I can see the drive (as 3 different drives X,Y, and Z) but Win Explorer doesn’t pick it up. I removed the drive from the network enclosure and attached it via a SATA to USB 3.0 adapter to my desk top computer and ran Seatools on the drive. Seatools did a long generic on the drive and it passed, HOWEVER when I do BOOT DRIVE PROPERTIES it shows the HDD in my computer NOT the external Seagate. Twenty years experience tells me the drive is readable but needs to be low leveled or (safer) replaced BUT I’d like the date on it if I can get it. iOmega’s software can see the drive too but doesn’t recognize a drive letter just folders (I believe they are movable partitions rather than actual folders) so I’m thinking MBR is corrupted. Your software looks like it can rebuild the MBR but I can’t get your software to open any drives even the known good ones in and attached to the computer. My desktop is acting just fine I’ve run CHKDSK and I’m not getting any errors or BSOD’s. What do you suggest?

    • Jacqui Best October 16, 2013 3:42 pm #

      Bill Morris,
      Here is the deal network attached storage runs off its own hybrid OS (usually Linux) and each manufacturer has their own way of doing things. You are not going to be able and plug the drive in and pick it up with windows or any standard software. You maybe able with a more high end tool be able to recover the data with software. A little warning though don’t over run the drive if it is a physical problem with the hard drive you may make the problem worse.

  28. Sar September 26, 2013 10:49 am #

    Hi, I am basic computer internet user. I purchased a Toshiba 1TB USB 3.0 hard drive today. I firstly copied my movies on to it soon after plugging into my laptop which uses windows 7. I was then told I needed to format it and change file system from default NTFS to exFAT which I did after deleting all the movies off it. I have then placed all my movies back on and trying to plug it into my dvd player and blu-ray player however my cheap dvd player after selecting usb searches and saying unable to read files. When plugging it into my blu-ray it is bring up the setup option only and not allowing me to select movies, music or photo files.
    Please help, is there something I have missed in initial set up.
    It is showing in my computer and in disk management. I can watch the movies on it on my laptop but not on a dvd player through usb port.
    Please help

    • Jacqui Best October 16, 2013 3:38 pm #

      Sar,
      I would guess this is something to do with the setup of the drive having to be done in the right way to be read by dvd/blu-ray player. It might also be they are having issues with the USB 3.0 portion depending on the age of the device. I would see the blu-ray manual for further help.

  29. Siva November 19, 2013 1:14 am #

    Hi Team,

    We have an issue with my 500 gb WD sata hdd.

    When we are connecting it through external usb 2-0 enclosure to our laptop having windows 8 , the disk appears as unknown 2048 gb in computer management.

    When we tried Recover It All Demo, the external hdd appeared as unknown of 2048gb.

    Hence, we want to know how we can access this sata hdd.

    Thank you in advance.

    • Jacqui Best February 24, 2014 2:01 pm #

      Siva,
      Did you allow RIA to run a full physical scan?

  30. Yange November 26, 2013 1:39 am #

    My HDD doesdot show up on window but it is recognised in Disk manangement with only one “right click” option of DELETE VOLUME. Any help?

    • Jacqui Best February 24, 2014 2:00 pm #

      Yange,
      You can run data recovery software on the drive then and I would recommend doing that.

  31. srikanth December 6, 2013 11:07 am #

    hi,
    My self using Toshiba 3.0 External Hard Disk(500 GB).It is presently not working when i connect to my laptop it is showing the drive but unable to open,scan it .It is also not showing the physical data.
    can any one help to recover the whole data

    • Jacqui Best February 24, 2014 1:59 pm #

      Srikanth,
      Have you tried to see if you can run data recovery software on the disk?

  32. Elia Rei March 16, 2014 6:13 am #

    Can I fix this problem by reinstalling Windows XP? Because I don’t have the money to purchase any of the products above. Thank you.

    • Jacqui Best March 20, 2014 12:27 pm #

      No if the drive is not showing up in windows re loading windows will not fix the problem.

  33. John January 16, 2015 9:31 am #

    Hi
    HI MY TOSHIBA HD NOT SHOWING ON MY PC
    BUT IT LIGHT AND IT SHOW BLUE SOMETIME WHAT SHOW DO TO FIX IT

  34. Kriston February 4, 2015 9:18 pm #

    Hi, I have a seagate 1 TB hard drive that I have movies on and the computer is finally recognizing it but now will not allow me to open it. I went to Disk Management and it is showing healthy (Primary Partition). What is another step I could take to possibly use my hard drive? Thanks in advance!!

    • secureadmin February 4, 2015 9:25 pm #

      Kriston,
      Is the drive being assigned a drive letter?

  35. Ajay Patro February 22, 2015 3:17 am #

    Hi
    In my internal Seagate 1TB Hard disk folders and files are showing, but not displaying when I open the files. could any one help me?

    • secureadmin February 24, 2015 2:59 pm #

      Ajay,
      Does it take a long time to display the folders?

      Thanks
      Jacqui

  36. Cameron July 28, 2015 7:11 pm #

    Hi. I have 3 internal harddrives. Win 8 is installed on “C”. Drives “G” and “F” are for media storage. All three drives are SATA. A few months ago drive G just disappeared and I was no longer able to access files from it or view its existance. This wasnt too big a deal because drive F was a backup of drive G. Now drive F has also disappeared. I went through the steps to get to computer management and the drives do not show up in there either. Does this mean my drives are done? Is there any way to bring them back? I really hope theres at least a way to get the files off…Thanks!

  37. Dan O'Brien August 15, 2015 9:39 am #

    Hi.
    My refurbished Compaq d530 computer has two identical Seagate 80 GB Barracuda HDDs operating as Drive (C:) and Drive (D:), where (D:) is a bootable clone of (C:), both being fully accessible from the WIN-HP operating system and being able to transfer files between the two devices. Problem is that, as a result of unknown source of computer corruption “Drive (D)” is no longer accessible from the operating system. Disk Management now shows Drive (D:) as a “CD-ROM 0” which is in error.

    “Disk 0” does still correctly show as Drive (C). “Disk1” shows as Drive (F:), a Removable 8GB FAT32 (that is actively installed in a computer port) both showing as being “Healthy.”

    As this information on Drive (D:) was incorrect, I since removed the “drive.” Though still showing as a CD-ROM 0 DVD it now shows in Disk Management as ”No Media.”

    How do I get the operating system (Disk Management) to again recognize Drive (D:) as an actively accessible Hard Drive?

    Thank you for any advice you may offer.

  38. Dan O'Brien August 15, 2015 9:46 am #

    P.S.
    The two hard drives both remain functional when installed as Drive (C:)

  39. Eric Smith November 17, 2015 4:59 pm #

    I have a bad portable drive I see it in disk management not initialized. Do I initialize it first before I run a data recovery tool?

    • secureadmin December 16, 2015 12:35 pm #

      Eric,
      No initializing can wipe data. If it is not initializing it could be a bad enclosure or other bad hardware. I recommend calling the office to speak with a technician to evaluate the situation.

  40. David Morgan December 22, 2015 6:05 pm #

    Well downloaded the surface scanner……does not function..just sits there,, pushing various buttons (mount,, nothing,,,scan,, please mount a drive first, etc.. once windows reported it stopped working, checking online for a solution….

    using windows 7

    • secureadmin February 9, 2016 1:19 pm #

      David,
      Try right clicking on it and running as administrator.
      Please let me know if you have any other problems

  41. osait January 23, 2016 6:38 am #

    Hey i ran the DTI surface scanner with my crashed laptop hard disk. It did not report any bad sector. The computer says a harddisk is connected but its not showing in my computer?
    How can i get my data back.

    My hard disk was infected with a virus and all my images were showing a size of “4kb”
    Later after a week it crashed so i had to replace it with a new one.

    Anyone help suggest please how can i get my data back?

    • secureadmin February 9, 2016 1:14 pm #

      Osait,

      What was the virus?

      Thanks

  42. Surinder February 8, 2016 1:37 am #

    sir
    I have HP Notebook 15-D017tu Model laptop.
    In pc Disc drive C or D not showing.
    So please suggest me any solution.

    • secureadmin February 9, 2016 1:06 pm #

      Surinder,
      If the hard drive is not showing up I would recommend trying to slave it to another computer to see if you can have access to the data.

  43. Shubham April 3, 2016 3:43 am #

    In computer management my pen drive not showing please help

  44. Bhaaskar July 11, 2016 2:29 am #

    Hi,
    Few months back i bought a 2TB Seagate hard drive. It was running in PC and other laptops but it was showing in Macbook Pro, which I have and the matter of Harddrive could be copied and pasted in that. The problem was that the matter from Macbook pro could not be pasted in hard drive. I read online solution and tried for that problem and it was solved.
    Another problem came now it is not showing in all other PCs and other laptops. I tried above solutions provided here.
    It is showing in disk manager, but i am not able to do anything on that. What should I do to make hard drive workable in all.
    Thanks in advance.

  45. Kevin K January 23, 2017 10:28 am #

    Hello. I’m trying to recover data from a SSD that is 100% full. For some reason the drive won’t work whatsoever. It won’t boot windows, and windows acts like theres no drive there at all. I hooked it up to another machine as a secondary drive to try to just recover data and format it but it doesn’t show up in my computer, and in disk management it shows there is a drive there called Disk 0 and it says it’s online, but there is nothing in the left windows where it should show partitions. It’s literally blank. It also doesn’t show how much storage there is on the drive. it says capacity 0 and available 0 even though its capacity is 120gb. Like I said the drive is 100% full but it should still work. ANyone got any ideas? Thanks!

  46. Moe March 5, 2017 9:59 pm #

    Hi to all, the contents present at this site are really awesome
    for people knowledge, well, keep up the nice work fellows.

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