[SOLVED] External hard drive not detected

[wengang1]

I've looked at numerous forum posts and youtube videos, but none of them are comprehensive in nailing down the problem,

Here is my situation.

I have a Seagate 8TB external drive that has its own power source and a USB 3 cable that is standard USB on the computer end and slightly forked on the drive end (think its called Micro B or sth like that).

The drive is no longer being detected when plugged into my laptop, previously was detected with no problem.
All of my USB ports on the laptop are working when tested with other devices (my cell phone).
The Seagate drive is working when I connect it to another laptop.
There are 3 USB ports on the computer and the problem is consistent with all of them.

The drive is lighting up and spinning up, but never shows up.

It is NOT present in Disk Management, so there is no way to manipulate it into showing up (formatting, etc.). Anyway, I'm not interested in formattting as it has a lot of data on it and works fine on another laptop.

All the USB controller icons in Device Manager say they are already using the most recent driver.

Uninstalled/removed all the USB controllers and rebooted, no change.

There are no devices anywhere showing a yellow triangle.

The problem suddenly occurred. I would like to get it fixed, but pretty much all the solutions online hinge on the drive being present in Disk Management but not showing up in Explorer, which is not the case.

Thoughts?
Thanks.

 

[Grobe]

This is a MS windows issue, Have experienced that myself a couple of times. I think that in a point of time, if the USB drive isn't properly detected by windows or something, then Windows silently "reject" the usb drive next time.

There are probably a registry key representing that particular usb device that you have to delete in order to let windows "re-discover" the device.