Hard drive not showing

[Iainpercival1972]

Windows 10 laptop not showing my 1TB Baffalo external drive.

I will hear the noise that indicates I have connected the device but it won't appear in My Computer

It does show in device manager and I have tried everything from assigning a path letter, uninstall, disable, drivers, all with no luck.

This is a relatively new drive with over 600Gb of files.

Everything was working fine until I went to search for a file on the drive and it just closes and hasn't worked since.

Don't want to format as I have family pictures I dare not lose

 

[John_VanKirk]

Hello, and welcome to Tom's Hardware!

Tell us what computer you are using and the OS installed. ?Win 10 1607? Was this Buffalo drive originally attached to a Win-XP computer, that was migrated over to a Win-7 or Win-10 machine?

Take another look in Device Manager. Is there a yellow or red alert or warning icon in front of the drive? Then double click on the drive, and make sure it says "This drive is working properly"

Then go to Disk Management (This PC > manage) and look in the lower graphical section. To the left of the Buffalo drive is the Disc Status, and it should say Disk #, Basic or Dynamic - Online. on the right side the Volume Status should give you the Disk Name, Volume letter, NTFS formatting, and say Healthy, or Unallocated, or possibly some other designation.
If you could post an image of that section, that would be very helpful in determining what went wrong, and how to fix it.

 

[Mike 777]

If you are using windows 10 version 1607, that's the problem. There is currently a bug in that version of windows, not allowing your PC to detect external hard drives.

Downgrade to a previous version and it will work.

I had the same problem and after downgrading, it worked.

 

[Iainpercival1972]

Hello, and welcome to Tom's Hardware!

Tell us what computer you are using and the OS installed. ?Win 10 1607? Was this Buffalo drive originally attached to a Win-XP computer, that was migrated over to a Win-7 or Win-10 machine?

Take another look in Device Manager. Is there a yellow or red alert or warning icon in front of the drive? Then double click on the drive, and make sure it says "This drive is working properly"

Then go to Disk Management (This PC > manage) and look in the lower graphical section. To the left of the Buffalo drive is the Disc Status, and it should say Disk #, Basic or Dynamic - Online. on the right side the Volume Status should give you the Disk Name, Volume letter, NTFS formatting, and say Healthy, or Unallocated, or possibly some other designation.
If you could post an image of that section, that would be very helpful in determining what went wrong, and how to fix it.

Running windows 10 home version 1511 that upgraded via Microsoft from windows 8 approx. 8 months ago however hardrive has been working fine. this is an external drive that I have been using for almost a year on two separate laptops that now wont work on either as and from two days ago

no warning alerts showing against drive in device management,

drive not appearing in disk management at all, and cannot attach screenshots ?????

I have a 2tb Seagate drive that works fine

 

[Iainpercival1972]

Hello, and welcome to Tom's Hardware!

Tell us what computer you are using and the OS installed. ?Win 10 1607? Was this Buffalo drive originally attached to a Win-XP computer, that was migrated over to a Win-7 or Win-10 machine?

Take another look in Device Manager. Is there a yellow or red alert or warning icon in front of the drive? Then double click on the drive, and make sure it says "This drive is working properly"

Then go to Disk Management (This PC > manage) and look in the lower graphical section. To the left of the Buffalo drive is the Disc Status, and it should say Disk #, Basic or Dynamic - Online. on the right side the Volume Status should give you the Disk Name, Volume letter, NTFS formatting, and say Healthy, or Unallocated, or possibly some other designation.
If you could post an image of that section, that would be very helpful in determining what went wrong, and how to fix it.

Running windows 10 home version 1511 that upgraded via Microsoft from windows 8 approx. 8 months ago however hardrive has been working fine. this is an external drive that I have been using for almost a year on two separate laptops that now wont work on either as and from two days ago

no warning alerts showing against drive in device management,

drive not appearing in disk management at all, and cannot attach screenshots ?????

I have a 2tb Seagate drive that works fine

 

[Iainpercival1972]

Hello, and welcome to Tom's Hardware!

Tell us what computer you are using and the OS installed. ?Win 10 1607? Was this Buffalo drive originally attached to a Win-XP computer, that was migrated over to a Win-7 or Win-10 machine?

Take another look in Device Manager. Is there a yellow or red alert or warning icon in front of the drive? Then double click on the drive, and make sure it says "This drive is working properly"

Then go to Disk Management (This PC > manage) and look in the lower graphical section. To the left of the Buffalo drive is the Disc Status, and it should say Disk #, Basic or Dynamic - Online. on the right side the Volume Status should give you the Disk Name, Volume letter, NTFS formatting, and say Healthy, or Unallocated, or possibly some other designation.
If you could post an image of that section, that would be very helpful in determining what went wrong, and how to fix it.

Running windows 10 home version 1511 that upgraded via Microsoft from windows 8 approx. 8 months ago however hardrive has been working fine. this is an external drive that I have been using for almost a year on two separate laptops that now wont work on either as and from two days ago

no warning alerts showing against drive in device management,

drive not appearing in disk management at all, and cannot attach screenshots ?????

I have a 2tb Seagate drive that works fine

 

[John_VanKirk]

Very unusual that the disk is listed in Device Manager as a hardware item, but not in Disk Management!

Try these steps to see if you can get a drive letter assigned to the external drive.

Make sure your Buffalo drive is attached, and has power, Then boot up your computer.

Next, right clk on the start button, and choose the CMD prompt (as an Adm).
In the command line interface, type Diskpart. That will start the Diskpart utility.
Then type List Volume
That will show you all the Volumes (with an associated number) attached to your computer.
The Buffalo drive should be one of the Volumes, and may not have a Letter assigned to it.
The row will show the Volume #, if it has an assigned letter, the file system, type, volume size, and hopefully "healthy"

Write down the Volume # (like Volume 1, or Volume 3) associated with the Buffalo external drive.
Next type Select Volume # (the volume number). This selects the volume you are going to change.
Then type Assign Letter=K (some letter not assigned to another drive listed there.
Lastly, type Exit which will take you back to the command prompt
Close out and see if your drive is now listed in File Explorer and in the Graphical section of Disk Management

 

[Iainpercival1972]

Buffalo drive not appearing as one of the drives?

screenshots

 

[John_VanKirk]

Your image really help a lot. Take a look at Drive 1 (labelled E), that show a size of 465GB and RAW. The RAW means it has lost it's file system or has been corrupted. Here is a brief explanation.

A RAW File system status is seen when a partition has not been properly formatted with the file system or has become corrupted by virus infection, format failure, accidental shut down, or power outage. It can involve a single file system or all the file systems on the Disk drive if part or all the partition table has been corrupted. It shows both used and free space as 0 bytes & either RAW or No File System depending on the OS version. Reformatting the partition with a File System without data extraction or recovery will cause complete data loss in that partition.

I would guess this is your Buffalo Removable drive. There is really no reason to have a different HDD connected to your computer, with a Volume Status of RAW. If so, don't reformat it or write to it, as you will lose the data on the drive.

Confirm that is the "missing" drive and we can go from there.
In the interim, there is a Recovery Program called M3 Data Recovery, that states it can convert a RAW (no format on the drive) to NTFS, with no data loss. Might take a look at it. There is a 30 day free trial.
http://www.m3datarecovery.com/raw-to-ntfs/

Otherwise, two good data recovery programs are Easeus Data Recovery Wizard , or the TenorShare Data Recovery program. With those, they locate your files by type on the Data section of the drive, and will copy them to a good properly formatted drive of a size that will hold all the data. Once your data is safely copied, then you can reformat the buffalo drive, check it for errors, and place it back into use.