External Hard drive doesn't show in File Explorer

[gduffonline]

Just recently my hard drive went a-wall on me. It showed up as local disk G for like a day but yesterday it stopped showing up. It shows in device manager under disk drives but that's the only place. Doesn't show when I use diskmgmt.msc... Also, whenever restarting my computer, the very first loading screen freezes until I remove my hard drive and then it runs but if I attach it again while restarting, it freezes. I really just need it to show up on the file explorer so I could use my data recovery software.

 

[hang-the-9]

Seems like your drive is bad, try removing it from the enclosure and connect it to a desktop directly with a SATA cable, or try another enclosure. This may not work with all external drive since some use a custom connection or use encryption through the enclosure.

You, like many others, just learned why you do not keep single copies of files around. Use your external drive for backups of your main drives, not to hold only copies of files.