Question Computer not recognizing ANY external drives suddenly

Jan 17, 2021
4
0
10
My husband found me an USB hub in a pile of hand-me-down electronics. I figured I'd try it out by plugging in my external hard drives (both 1TB). That's when I had my first mistake: I unplugged the drives without ejecting them first. Woops, but I've done it before with these drives and nothing bad's happened before (one a Seagate one a WD). My computer brought up an error message but it disappeared immediately after it opened. I plugged my hard drives into the Hub and plugged it into my PC... Nothing. Well I didn't expect much, figured the Hub was junk.

But then I go to plug in my drives and nothing. They do not show up in Explorer, they do not show up in Disk Management (just nothing, no "unallocated" data, it only shows my internal hard drives). I do not see them in Device Manager.

Both drives start up when I plug them in (Light up, whirring sounds, no odd/out of place noises). I have changed around the cords but I only have 3 USB-3.0 cords and all 3 were used with the Hub (2 for the drives one for the Hub itself).

I have restarted my computer many, many times.

I have gone into Device Manager and updated any drives, but they're all up to date. I don't recognize what would possibly be the specific USB for my drives and have deleted each one-by-one and restarting my computer, to get windows to download any messed up drivers itself.

I have turned off "USB Selective Suspend Setting"


If anyone has anything else to help I would greatly appreciate it.
 
Last edited:
Jan 17, 2021
4
0
10
Can you open up the Seagate enclosure? If the USB-SATA electronics is on a separate board, try connecting the bare drive to a SATA port inside your computer.


They're both the newer style drives with no visible screws or openings to disassemble. I was hoping to possibly get them fixed without destroying the cases but it seems that's my only alternative at this point.
 
Jan 17, 2021
4
0
10
Well good news and bad news! Good news I opened the drives and I was able to stick one of them into my computer no problem, reads everything fine. But the other drive sadly doesn't have a Sata connection, only the USB. But it does bear hope that the drive itself is fine if the other is too, so just need to find a way to get the data off of it.