How to Recover Data from External Hard Drive That is Not Recognized?

Updated on March 27, 2020

If your external hard drive is not recognized when connected to your Windows or Mac system, just remain calm, and go through this tutorial to fix the issues and recover data from external hard drive that is not recognized. Yodot Hard Drive Recovery software recovers files from your external hard drive that is not detected or recognized on your system. Continue reading further to know how to recover files from unrecognized external hard drive with Yodot Hard Drive Recovery tool.

When an external hard drive is not recognized on your computer, then you might be prompted with the error message saying "there is no disk in drive". This error may occur due to any of these reasons:

• If USB port of the PC is not working
• Virus infection
• Issues with hard drive drivers
• Hard drive failure or corruption

So how to fix external hard drive not recognized issue due to any of these reasons? Don't worry! Try the below given manual methods to fix the issues with your external hard drive:

Solution #1: Fix USB port issue and see whether the computer can read external hard drive

So, first connect your external hard drive to another computer and test if it is the USB port problem. If it works in another computer, you should fix the USB port. Otherwise, you need try the following methods in order to resolve the issue.

Solution #2: Uninstall hard drive driver

• Go to Start > Type: devmgmt.msc and hit Enter
• Open Device manager > Expand Universal Serial Bus controllers > check out whether any device show up as unrecognized
• If it shows unrecognized, go to driver’s tab and delete/uninstall the driver; Then check out whether the external hard drive shows up in My Computer or not
• If it doesn’t show up, reboot or restart PC and see

Solution #3: Enable “Show all hidden devices”

• Click on Start > Type: devmgmt.msc and hit Enter
• Click View in the device manager > Select Show hidden devices
• Expand all notes by clicking on + symbol
• If there are any greyed entries, right-click on it and select Uninstall
• Reboot and try again

If still the problem of external hard drive not detecting is not resolved, then there might a drive corruption problem. So for the recovery of data from damaged external HDD, go to Disk Management and check if you can see the drive letter there. If yes, then go to next part which is all about recovering data when external hard drive is not detected.

How to recover data from external hard drive that is not recognized?

To carryout data recovery from unrecognized hard drive, Yodot Hard Drive Recovery Application is the most suited one. This software will read the drive and find lost files based on their unique file signatures. It will restore data of various types like Microsoft Office files, photos, videos, music files, archive files, PDF documents, etc. from external hard drive. So here is a complete guide to recover data from undetected external HDD:

• Connect unrecognized external hard drive to the computer
• Download and install Yodot Hard Drive Recovery software on that computer
• Launch the software and begin the data recovery process
• Choose “Partition Recovery” option
• The application now display all the drives present on your system
• Select external hard drive to continue with data recovery process
• On the next window, software asks you to select the file types that you want to recover
• Choose the files you want to retrieve otherwise click on “Skip” to select all the files by default
• The application starts scanning portable hard drive now and displays all the recoverable files
• Choose the one you want to restore and click on “Next”
• Preview the files before saving and finally save it into a desired location

Well, there is one more recovery option you can find when you launch this software, that is Formatted/Reformatted Recovery option. As the option itself indicates, you can retrieve data from formatted hard drives.

Not only this, recovering external hard drive data with bad sectors is also possible using Yodot Hard Drive Recovery Program. First, the tool creates disk images of bad sectored drives and then later allow you to get back the data using those images.

Other Popular Software