My external hard drive/disk is not detected by laptop

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

My 1TB external hard drive/disk (7-8 years old) is not detected by laptop.
What should I do?
I am at Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh.
Please suggest me solution.

2

@tarunpatel There could be a few reasons why the drive is not detecting. The drive itself could have failed, the partition on the drive may be damaged, the data cable may no longer be good, or the drive may no longer be getting enough power to fully spin up.

Please refer to the following article for troubleshooting steps as the drive is not getting detected:

Title: Windows or macOS Cannot Find My Drive
Link: Cannot Find My WD Drive on Windows or macOS

Also, I would suggest you to test the drive health status through Western Digital Dashboard.

Title: Testing a drive for problems using The Western Digital Dashboard
Link: https://wddashboarddownloads.wdc.com/wdDashboard/DashboardSetup.exe

Hope this helps!

3

There could be various reasons for your external hard drive to become unresponsive or undetected. It can be a hardware issue or some technical issue in the software. The external drive may be detected by the system if you connect it to another PC, but it doesn’t respond.

Below are the few possible reasons for an external drive being unresponsive:

  • A lot of bad sectors
  • Infected File (Virus or Malware)
  • Driver issue
  • Mechanical failure

You can try the below options to resolve the issue:

  • Run CHKDSK
  • Use an Antivirus & Anti-Malware tool
  • Re-install the drivers

Apart from above methods you can also try the below fixes to resolve the issue:

  1. Connect ATA/SATA drive with another cable port
  2. Enable the drive in BIOS
  3. Update the drive drivers
  4. Initialize the hard drive
  5. Format the drive

Hope this will help.