Question WD External Hard Drive won't show up after scanning

andromedaftw

Honorable
Jul 11, 2015
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10,680
Hello, i borrowed this drive from a friend so i can backup his files. After plugging the drive in my pc, it shows up with no problems. However, for safety i tried scanning it with windows defender. It detects 1 virus and the scan stopped. I tried to "clean threat" and
"quarantine" that virus but i didn't realize that the drive was ejected already. Now, i tried re-plugging it many times and it won't show up.
Sometimes it will show, but it won't show the disk space, only the drive name and it's letter and after that it will automatically eject and windows will give an error "The last usb device you connected to this computer malfunctioned".

I can't even check it on disk management as it just loads. Please help me, it contains important data of my friend. Thank you
*P.S.
  • The drive was working this day before my friend gave it to me
  • I tried it on my other laptop and it won't show up either
 

andromedaftw

Honorable
Jul 11, 2015
108
0
10,680
doens't show up on multiple system? sound like hardware
good thing is this is the backup. get another storage and start backup again.
Yes, but the weird thing he was able to access this drive with no problems a few hours before he sent it to me. Unfortunately, it had some important files on it so i need to access it.
 

PEnns

Reputable
Apr 25, 2020
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605
5,760
Disk Management sometimes takes up to 4-5 minutes to gather all the information.

Please leave it on for a few minutes, and when it loads, please take a screen shot and post it here.

Sometimes external hard drives lose their drive designations (D/ E / F etc) and become invisible. This could be easily fixed and then the drive becomes accessible again.
 

andromedaftw

Honorable
Jul 11, 2015
108
0
10,680
Disk Management sometimes takes up to 4-5 minutes to gather all the information.

Please leave it on for a few minutes, and when it loads, please take a screen shot and post it here.

Sometimes external hard drives lose their drive designations (D/ E / F etc) and become invisible. This could be easily fixed and then the drive becomes accessible again.
I tried waiting for long but the external drive will disconnect automatically, only after that then it will load. The drive shows in File Explorer as "E:" but doesn't display any capacity