[SOLVED] Why isn't my external hard drive being detected?

[impmadness]

I have an external hard drive, Seagate 2TB, it worked perfectly until after defragmenting it with the Windows tool for a bit and cancelling it safely, because I needed to shut down the PC, it no longer is recognized by the PC, it doesn't show up on device manager or disk management, not even by diskpart. After a reboot I got the idea to disable Windows Defender and it was immediately detected, all my data is still there, but after that I disconnected it safely to try and see if it wasn't just luck, but after that it isn't recognized again, not even after rebooting or doing the Windows Defender trick. I'm seriously mad, I know the drive is working but why is this happening? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

SOLVED: By buying a new USB cable for it, all of your answers were helpful, but not the solution in the end, still, thanks a lot!

 

[dwd999]

I have an external hard drive, Seagate 2TB, it worked perfectly until after defragmenting it with the Windows tool for a bit and cancelling it safely, because I needed to shut down the PC, it no longer is recognized by the PC, it doesn't show up on device manager or disk management, not even by diskpart. After a reboot I got the idea to disable Windows Defender and it was immediately detected, all my data is still there, but after that I disconnected it safely to try and see if it wasn't just luck, but after that it isn't recognized again, not even after rebooting or doing the Windows Defender trick. I'm seriously mad, I know the drive is working but why is this happening? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

What you could do would depend on how much data you have on the Seagate and what other storage options you have available. Usually in any situation where Windows fails at any task I advocate downloading a linux live distro (e.g. a LinuxMint Mate ISO), creating a bootable usb using Rufus (Rufus.ie) and booting that up. You can use the file manager included in it to see if you can access your external drive and salvage your essential files. But that would depend on having somewhere else where you could copy them to, which probably won't be an option is you have too much data. If you could rescue your data and store it somewhere else temporarily then you could use the gparted app included there to delete all of the Seagate's old partitions and start with a fresh GPT partition. If Windows then recognizes the Seagate you could put your data back. Or if the Seagate is unsalvageable, you could get a new external drive and copy your data to it.

 

[davidspaho]

You could try downloading Hard Disk Sentinel and checking if it shows up there. If it does then thats good. You can try the minitool partition wizard to recover the whole partition without losing any data. This has worked for me many times.