Portable Hd Not Recognized

New returnee to the forum (out several years). I am not a novice with computers, but certainly not an expert.

I have two Hitachi 500GB portable drives that I have used for 3-4 years to load and carry work files, primarily videos on one and documents on the other. One of them (videos) suddenly is not recognized when it is plugged in: the computer simply never acknowledges that a device is present.

Anything I can do to recover what I have on it? It's not really a crisis, but I hate to loose the videos.

 

Welcome to Major Geeks

Have a look in the computers system's Disk Management - press Windows Key + R, type diskmgmt.msc into the Run dialog, and press Enter. It should show all drive devices including the external devices.
You didn't say what the OS on your system is so it's not possible to be more specific.

 

Well, apparently MajorGeeks is engaged in the Miracle business. I've been trying to read this drive for several months now. When I plugged it into my laptop to try your suggestion, it popped up and now reads just fine. Can't explain it, but I'll take it.
I did make a note of your instruction for future reference.

 

This should be a warning to make backups of all files you don't want lost. Note I said backups as in more than one.

 

It could simply have been an issue with the USB cable, or one of the ports as well.