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

A minute of looking is worth an hour of clicking

Before you start clicking, plugging, unplugging or downloading anything, take the time to just sit there quietly for one minute. Plug the drive in and look at it: Is the light coming on? Can you feel a gentle vibration from the platters turning inside the case? Is it making any noise now that it wasn't last month? These three observations will get almost all missing drives into their correct category (a cheap connection problem, a file system that's lost its way, or a dying piece of hardware), and once you know which category your drive fits into, you'll have the right solution. Clicking around is guessing. Taking the minute to look is diagnosing.

One key factor stands out from all others so it should be stated first and simply; if you have a drive that keeps clicking, buzzing, beeping, or spinning up and then dying over and over again, you've got a mechanical problem. Most commonly this will be failing heads or a struggling motor after being knocked, and each additional second you run it will grind fragile mechanisms across the surface where your files are stored. Unplug it at the wall immediately and go directly to the final part of this article. Nothing in between applies to a noisy drive.

The checks that cost nothing and risk less

Check the low-cost suspects in order of cost. First, check the lead. Leads supplied with portable hard drives are built to a budget, and not a high one. Next, test the port: straight into the computer itself, not via a hub, a monitor or the front panel of a desktop (the flakiest connections in the house). If there's a second computer nearby, see whether it can find the drive. Also, a desktop-sized external drive with its own plug-top power supply earns one extra suspicion: if it shows no sign of life whatsoever, the power supply fails much more often than the drive it feeds.

On Windows, the true picture is in Disk Management: right-click your Start icon and Disk Management will appear in the menu. If your drive appears in Disk Management but not in File Explorer, it may simply have lost its drive letter, and reassigning the drive letter ("Change Drive Letter and Paths") changes nothing that matters. The thing to watch for is a disk shown as RAW or "unallocated", or a prompt inviting you to initialise it. This indicates that the file system (the index to everything stored on your disk) has failed. The files are nearly always still present, sitting behind the broken index; and every solution Windows offers at this point, initialising included, writes over the structures needed to rebuild your data. So decline politely, and keep declining.

On a Mac, open Disk Utility and check "View → Show All Devices". Greyed volumes that can be seen but won't mount are typical and often salvageable. Two buttons deserve real caution: "Erase", which does exactly what it says, and "First Aid" on a drive making any new noise, because a repair pass is very hard on failing mechanics. Rule out one false alarm while you're there: a Windows-formatted drive (NTFS) won't work properly under macOS, and a drive formatted by an Apple machine means nothing to Windows. Many "dead" drives have simply been placed on the wrong desk.

Two brand quirks that mislead sensible people

One common way Seagate portable drives fail is to appear as though they are working normally (the light is on, it sounds like it is working) yet show up nowhere. In most cases this behaviour indicates that the USB bridge board or the firmware controlling that board is malfunctioning, not the disk itself. As such, swapping cables will never bring it back to life. However, bench equipment can bypass the faulty USB bridge board and usually finds the data on the disk itself sitting there unbothered. Western Digital portable drives (My Passport, Elements), however, set a different kind of trap: when writing information to the drive, the electronics inside the casing encrypt all of the data. If you were to remove the drive from the casing (shuck it) and connect it bare (as suggested by numerous forums), you would be reading ciphertext instead of plain text. Recovery on these drives has to work with the original board or reconstruct what it did, which requires professional bench work and is not suitable for the kitchen table.

Whatever the manufacturer, abandon the "replug" routine. If your drive takes five attempts to mount this morning and fifteen on Friday, the problem isn't that it's cranky; it's failing according to a schedule, and each successful mount brings it closer to the last one. The attempts 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 containing items you would miss; detection becoming less frequent by the week; recovery software that has been scanning since yesterday and found nothing it can actually open. Once beyond the line you are betting the files against the cost of asking, and asking is free. We see this weekly from each part of the patch: the student laptop drive from Heslington with a dissertation on it, the farm office external from the Vale containing ten years of accounts, the family photo drive that chose a Sunday to fail. None were made better with another attempt.

This process is quick and undramatic. Get a quote first by calling 0800 689 0668 or using the free online diagnostic, then wrap the drive well in its enclosure, with its cable and power supply, and post it tracked to the bench. Within 2 working days of it arriving, we'll give you the fault, an honest account of how much data can be recovered, and one fixed price in writing to accept or refuse. For further information about this service please visit the external hard drive recovery page, or tell us what happened via the free diagnostic.