Top 6 Ways: Fix Seagate External Hard Drive Not Recognized Error
/ Posted by Rlslee to Seagate External Hard Drive Recovery
Question 1: Hi, I have a 1TB Seagate External Hard Drive. When I connect it to my computer, it is not recognized by Windows.
Question 2: My Seagate 4TB USB 3.0 Seagate Backup Plus portable external hard drive cannot be detected by my computer but the light is blinking. What should I do to fix the not showing up error?
People are used to backing up a large number of files using Seagate External Hard Drive. However, sometimes your computer may fail to detect and recognize the Seagate external hard drive. If you can't quickly resolve the issue that Seagate's external hard drive can't be recognized, you may lose all files from the external hard drive.
Why Seagate External Hard Drive not recognized/detected or not showing up on your computer? There are four common reasons including USB port not working, your hard drive is out of data, virus attacks and hard drive failure.
Method 1: How to Fix Seagate External Hard Drive Not Detected Error when USB port not working?
If the Seagate external hard drive is flashing but not detected on the PC, you can try reconnecting it to another USB port. Alternatively you can restart your PC and try to connect your Seagate external drive to your computer again. If not, please move to next method.
Method 2: How to Fix Seagate External Hard Drive Not Recognized Error on Windows
Click Start, then click Run or press the Windows key + r, type diskmgmt.msc in the Run dialog and press Enter. This will open the Disk Management window. In this window, you can find an external disk even if your drive is not recognized because there is no partition.
If the Seagate External Hard Drive is not found in the Disk Management window, press Windows + r to open the Run dialog and type "devmgmt.msc" and press Enter. Expand the disk drive and look for a device with a yellow exclamation point. A yellow exclamation mark indicates a driver with a problem. Right click on the device and read the error message after selecting the properties. This issue can be resolved in two ways: by clicking the Update Driver button to install the updated driver, or by uninstalling the driver and restarting the computer. After rebooting, Windows will automatically reinstall and reconfigure the driver. Then connect your Seagate External Hard Drive to PC again, if the drive still does not recognize, partitioning and formatting issues may be the cause of this problem. The issue can be fixed using the Windows Disk Management tool.
To create a new partition, you can right-click inside the unallocated space and select New Simple Volume. You can follow the instructions on the screen to create a new partition. Sometimes your drive is formatted using the Linux, NTFS file system, HFS Plus file system or FAT32 file system ext4 file system, which Windows does not recognize. Reformatting the drive can resolve this issue. To do this, right click on the partition, select the format, and select the file system. Here, it's important to know that all the files in the drive will be deleted. Therefore, copy the files to other systems before proceeding.
Method 3: How to Fix Seagate External Hard Drive Hidden Error on Windows
Click on Start > Type: devmgmt.msc and hit Enter. Click View > Select Show hidden devices. Expand all notes by clicking on the + (plus) symbol. If there any grayed-out entries, you can right-click them and select Uninstall. Reboot and try again.
Method 4: How to Repair Virus Attacked Seagate External Hard Drive
You can try to use popular virus clean software to remove any viruses from your PC and Seagate External Hard Drive. After that, you can format the hard drive to make it readable again, but formatting will erase all the data on the drive.
Method 5: How to Fix Seagate External Hard Drive Not Detected/ Recognized on Mac Computer
Click File and then click New Finder Window. Find the drive below the remote disk. If the external drive is not there, make sure the USB cable is properly plugged into the external hard drive and port. Sometimes the drive is connected but not installed. To install the drive, open Disk Utility to look for the drive in the list. If it is there, please check it below. Now click the mounting button to install. Open the finder window to see if the drive is installed. If you still can't find it in the finder, use a USB cable, one for the external HD and two for the Mac. This will provide the power required for Seagate external hard drive.
Method 6: How to Recover Data after Seagate External Hard Drive Recognized/Detected on Mac
Download and install Mac Seagate External Hard Drive Recovery Pro software on your Mac computer and connect Seagate External Hard Drive to Mac with an USB cable.
Step 1: Run the App
Select the Seagate External drive location from the list and click "Start" button to process.
Step2: Retrieve Lost Files
After the scanning completed, you can preview the data which is found by Seagate External drive recovery tool and select the data to recover.
