Usb Drive Problem

Hi, one of my external drives is not functioning and I wondered if I need to destroy it and dispose of it or if there's something I might be able to do to make it work again.

If I plug the drive into the PC (a desktop running Windows 10) I hear the sound that windows makes when you plug in the drive but it doesn't do anything else (ie assign it a drive letter) and it's not showing in the file manager. I get exactly the same result if I plug it into my wife's laptop running Windows 11.

Interestingly, if I start up Macrium Reflect, the drive does get a mention but the box which normally gives information about any drives that you have connected, is all greyed out for that particular drive.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Thank you!

 

is the external drive in a case that you can take apart? over the years i have had external drives that appear to go bad. to make sure, i take the hard drive out of the case, use one of those HDD/SSD to USB adapters, and try again. sometimes the hard drive did die, other times the hard drive is fine, and it was the chipset of the external drive case that stopped working. hopefully it is the later and not the former. good luck with it.

 

Thank you for your kind response. Unfortunately the drive may not be disassembled.

 

well, no brilliant ideas, if an external drive stops working, about the only way to check it would be to figure out a different method of attaching it to one's computer. sorry about that.

 

No worries! Thanks for your response. I thought I was getting somewhere last night after visiting the Seagate support site. From there I downloaded a couple of hopeful-looking disk utilities (one of which is called SeaTools) and the irony is that the faulty drive checks out okay, passing all of the tests. One suspicious thing is that it reports 0 bytes used and 2 Tb free. I know for a fact however that there are plenty of files on there.

I'll keep plugging away at it until it surrenders and starts working again. Trouble is, can I ever rely on it again for my backups? A wise person would say "no".

 

It's certainly worth a try but I'd need to buy a new cable to try that theory. The end that plugs into the drive looks a bit odd to me. A have a bazillion USB cables but none like this one. Thanks for the idea!

 

That's the one! Thank you.

 

Is the drive seen under diskpart?
Is there any files on the drive which you’d like to keep?
If it is seen then you could try cleaning the drive then formatting it to hopefully get it working again.
Start>Powershell/Terminal with admin & enter these one at a time:
Diskpart
List disk
Select disc X (where X is the number of the drive you wish to clean)
Clean
Exit
Exit

Then open disk management & it should show as a blank drive, right click on the drive & choose format. You may or may not be asked to initialise the disk on opening disk management.
If at any time the commands fail then the drive imo is bad.

 

Thank you very much for the suggestion and I shall certainly try this later. There are files on the disk but I can live without them - I'd pretty much written them off now anyway.

 

I tried DISKPART however although it APPEARED to be working - ie it reported that it had cleaned and formatted the disk, the disk is still not being recognised by Windows ie appearing in the file manager with an assigned drive letter.

Back to the drawing board lol.

 

Sounds like it may be a dud drive then.

 

I think that you are indubitably correct!

 

When going that route, besides the possibility of having to initialize the drive, when creating a partition and formatting, did one remember to specifically assign it a drive letter? If you do NOT assign it a drive letter in the machine being used, it won't show up in "File Manager." (It's an easy to miss option .)

 

I don't remember seeing the option to assign a drive letter. Is this something that should be entered into the command line separately? I'll have another wee look.

Thanks for your input.

 

Just before you "format," there is an option to assign the drive a letter in the computer you are using. If you don't assign it a letter, it won't show up in File Manager. The option to NOT assign a letter is if you are working on a drive (which WILL still be detected by Disk Management) and don't want your current file structure and letter assignments changed.

 

Thank you. Haven't had a chance to go back and look again but will soon.

 

Good luck; if that's all the problem, it's easily corrected (in most cases.) The alternative would be to shutdown the computer, remove the USB device, and reboot. Then, after re-connection, the USB device may be detected as an additional drive in File Manager, but again, it WILL be assigned a drive letter, which may cause problems with some software.

 

OMG!! With your help I have been able to resurrect my drive!! There was a lot of huffing and puffing inside Powershell to get it to do what I wanted it to do but I got there in the end. Then when the newly assigned drive letter was recognised in the windows file manager, it said that the total drive size was unrealistically tiny! (13 gigs on a 2 tb drive). Then I downloaded a free partitioning app from this site and again after some huffing and puffing finally figured out how it works and formatted a new partition that extended to the full size of the drive.

Thank you thank you thank you!!

 

I'm glad it was a "simple" fix. 30 years of experience from Apple ][+ to Windows 10 experience helps to know the little "pitfalls" that can be a headache, and potentially how to solve them. Happy Thanksgiving!

 

Same to you (though we had our Thanksgiving last month)!

What is Apple ][+ ?

 

I guess the "Apple ][+ was before(?) your time? It was the successor to the Apple ][, and had floating-point" basic, vs Integer Basic in the Apple ][. Both came out BEFORE the original IBM-PC. I got mine in 1982.

 

Definitely not before my time. Got my first computer in 1978 - an Acorn BBC model B with a Rockwell 6502 8-bit processor and 32K of RAM.

I was really referring to the use of square brackets. Never seen that before.

 

I can't remember the "Acorn" to any great detail; I don't think it was sols on "this side of the Pond?" Or at least, didn't sell very well. Both the Apples and Acorn did use the same processor, and the Apple may have originally sold with 32 K as well, with user-supplied memory to expand to 64K. (And I remember when Bill Gates said: "...nobody will even need more than 640 k of memory." (Famous last words?)