Suddenly Windows Will Not Recognize My 2TB Seagate USB External Drive

Before I recently upgraded my computer from Win 7 Pro to Win 10 Pro, the drive was working fine. But now Windows will not recognize the drive.......although it does show up in Disk Management, there is no content.

I then ran the utility EaseUS Partition Master, and immediately the disk was recognized. In fact, the disk contents were even shown (photos and short videos), and everything looks to be in order.

I tried connecting the drive to an older computer running Win 7 Ultimate. Same problem......Windows won't recognize it, but EaseUS recognizes it and shows the drive contents.

Any idea why Windows won't now recognize this drive? It was working fine on my new computer before I upgraded to Win 10.

Thanks in advance..........

Hi Durango and welcome to the forum. Is the external drive self powered or passive and if self powered does the light come on when you plug it in

I had a similar problem once. You can try to assign a drive letter manually using Disk Management. This issue can also be resolved by enabling automount and rebooting, which will bring this volume online and keep it online through subsequent reboots. Enabling automount can be done by opening a Command Prompt window and invoking DISKPART -> automount enable -> exit

With the external drive connected ...

1. Download dmDskmgr-vd.zip(contains dmDskmgr-vd.mmc)
   
   
2. Double click dmDskmgr-vd.zip to open the compressed folder
   Double click dmDskmgr-vd.mmc to launch the custom Disk Management console
   
   
3. Press Alt+PrtScn to grab a snapshot of just the Disk Management window
   Open Paint and Ctrl+V to paste it, then save the image
   
   
4. Attach the image to a new post

Thanks

I apologize for not responding to your replies. I got no notification that anyone had replied.

And yes the drive is self powered. The light comes on, and I can feel a little heat & vibration when it is plugged in.

I'll try the other suggestions this evening and report back.

OK, problem solved. Somehow during the Win 10 upgrade process, the drive letter got deleted and I did not notice that. So as Steve C suggested, I used Disk Management to assign a drive letter, and now Windows recognizes my drive.

Thanks much to everyone who responded.

Thanks to this thread..I faced the same problem though not exactly.. After couple of months I just fixed my friend's HDD just now.. Thank you very much.. ^_^

I had a similar problem once. You can try to assign a drive letter manually using Disk Management. This issue can also be resolved by enabling automount and rebooting, which will bring this volume online and keep it online through subsequent reboots. Enabling automount can be done by opening a Command Prompt window and invoking DISKPART -> automount enable -> exit

Thank you Steve!! My portable drives were not showing in ThisPC and this worked perfect. I was going to do a clean install next month with the new ISO but now I don't have to.

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