An external drive that's stopped showing up: look first, click later

A minute of looking is worth an hour of clicking

Before anything gets clicked, plugged, unplugged or downloaded, give the drive one quiet minute. Plug it in and just attend to it: does the light come on, does the case carry that faint tremor of platters spinning, does it make any sound it didn't make last month? Those three observations sort nearly every vanished drive into its box — a cheap connection niggle, a filesystem that's lost its way, or hardware on the way out — and each box has a different right answer. The clicking-around most people start with is guesswork; the minute of looking is diagnosis.

One observation trumps the rest, so it gets stated early and bluntly: a drive that clicks, buzzes, beeps, or spins up and dies over and over has a mechanical fault. That's failing heads or a struggling motor, very often after a knock, and every further minute of power is spent grinding delicate mechanics over the surfaces your files live on. Unplug it at the wall end of the minute and skip straight to the last section of this piece. Nothing between here and there applies to a noisy drive.

The checks that cost nothing and risk less

Work the cheap suspects in order of cheapness. The lead first — the cables shipped with portable drives are built to a price, and it isn't a high one. Then the port: straight into the computer itself, not through a hub, a monitor socket or the front panel of a desktop, which are the flakiest connections in the house. Then, if there's another computer about, let it have a look. And a desktop-sized drive with its own plug-top power supply earns one extra suspicion: if the drive shows no sign of life at all, the power brick dies far more often than the drive it feeds.

On Windows, the truthful picture is in Disk Management — right-click the Start button and it's on the list. A drive that appears there but not in File Explorer may simply have lost its drive letter, and giving it one back ('Change Drive Letter and Paths') alters nothing that matters. The fork to watch for is a disk showing as RAW or 'unallocated', or a prompt inviting you to initialise it. That means the filesystem — the index to everything on the drive — has come unstuck. The files are nearly always still there, sat behind the broken index; and every remedy Windows offers at that moment, initialising included, writes new structures over the ones a recovery would be rebuilt from. Decline politely and keep declining.

On a Mac, open Disk Utility and turn on View → Show All Devices. Seeing the hardware listed with a greyed-out volume that won't mount is common and often recoverable. Two buttons deserve fear: Erase, which does what it says, and First Aid run on a drive making any new noise, because a repair pass works failing mechanics hard. Rule out one false alarm while you're there — a drive formatted for Windows (NTFS) won't play properly on macOS, and an Apple-formatted drive means nothing to Windows. Plenty of 'dead' drives are just on the wrong desk.

Two brand quirks that mislead sensible people

Seagate portables have a signature failure: light on, sounds normal, appears nowhere. That's usually the USB bridge board or its firmware sulking, not the disk itself — no cable swap will talk it round, but bench equipment connects past the bridge and generally finds the data sitting there unbothered. WD portables — My Passport, Elements — lay a subtler trap: the electronics in the case encrypt everything as it's written. Shuck the drive out and wire it up bare, as the internet will suggest, and you'll be reading ciphertext. Recovery on those has to work with the original board or reconstruct what it did, which is bench work, not kitchen-table work.

Whatever the brand, retire the replug ritual. A drive that mounts on the fifth try today and the fifteenth on Friday isn't being temperamental; it's failing to a schedule, and each successful mount is nearer the last one. The tries you have left are better spent copying data off than proving the fault still exists.

Where the DIY road ends

Draw the line at any of these: new noises, especially after a drop; a RAW disk holding anything you'd grieve for; detection getting rarer by the week; recovery software that's scanned since yesterday and found nothing it can actually open. Beyond that line you're wagering the files against the cost of asking — and asking is free. We see this weekly from every corner of the patch: the student laptop drive from Heslington with a dissertation on it, the farm office external from the Vale that holds ten years of accounts, the family photo drive that chose a Sunday. None of them was improved by one more try.

The sensible close is quick and undramatic. Wrap the bare drive well, post it tracked to the bench, and inside 2 working days of it arriving you'll have the fault named, an honest account of what's recoverable, and one fixed figure in writing to accept or refuse. The service detail lives on the external hard drive recovery page, or start by telling us what happened via the free diagnostic.