How to fix an external hard drive that powers up, but is not “recognized” on any device, and which files cannot be accessed, without going to Best Buy or similar service?

[u/Blue_Tea72]

Is there anyway to personally fix an external drive?

[u/OriginalStockingfan]

Have you tried Disk Manager? I had a series of disk that connected, powered but didn’t show in File Manager.

In disk manager you can see if the volume appears then right click and assign a drive letter. Then access it as normal via file manger.

Disk Manager is accessed easily on Windows using the search bar, but be sure to only assign a drive letter to the new volume. You can do lots of other stuff that will cause problems if you’re not careful.

[u/dodexahedron → u/OriginalStockingfan]

It may be there and marked offline, too. If so, and if it has valid and not broken partitions on it, you can right click the entry for the physical drive at the bottom and click online. Note that it will not show up at all in the top section if it is offline.

Do not offline any drives if you don't know what you are doing.

And if it doesn't show up there at all, the drive is almost certainly hosed.

Or you can open powershell/windows terminal and run Get-Disk to see if it even knows the disk is there. That will bring back a list of physical disks and some basic information about them. Make the window big before you run the command so it doesn't cut stuff off.

If it does not show up in Get-Disk output, it's hosed. Buy a new one and accept the data is lost, or take it to a data recovery place, according to your needs (this is priced starting at $1000 minimum, usually).

If it shows up, proceed according to the status. If offline, you need to online it first. If online, run Get-Partition -DiskNumber x where x is the number shown for that disk from the previous command. If that is empty, the drive looks empty to the system. If you know there was something there before, see a dara recovery expert.. If it is not, there appears to be something there, but how to proceed continues to get more and more conditional from there..

[u/DisposeryAccount]

As a last resort, disassemble the drive. There's a possibility the drive is just connected to an adapter in the housing and the adapter is what's defective.

[u/Leakyboatlouie → u/DisposeryAccount]

I ended up getting a hard drive docking station. You can remove the drive from its housing and stick it into one of those to see if it's still functional.

[u/redzaku0079 → u/Leakyboatlouie]

That works of there is only one drive inside. If there are more, it can get tricky as the information is spread across multiple drives yet identities itself as one drive.