What To Do When You See The Hard Drive Is Not Recognized Error

Hard drive is not recognized error’ (festplatte wird nicht erkannt) can appear

whenever you are connecting your external hard drive to your Windows PC. This

could happen to many reasons but there are ways to fix this problem.

Although it’s fairly easy to connect and use a hard drive to a windows PC, sometimes we may encounter an error that says-‘hard drive is not recognized’ (festplatte wird nicht erkannt). There are many reasons why this could happen.

It could be possible that there are issues with your external drive, or the wrong file

system is being used, the USB port is dead, or there are issues in the Windows

drivers. It could also be possible that the drive could be not functioning properly, or

is simply dead.

Here are a few way through which you can try and fix your hard drive is not

recognized error that keeps appearing.

Is the Drive Showing Up in Disk Management?

The first thing to do is to check if the Windows OS is detecting the drive when it is

plugged in. Take your drive and plug it in your computer. You may also have to

activate the power switch of your hard drive if it has one.

Once you have plugged in the hard drive, open the Disk Management Tool in

Windows by pressing Windows Key + R, and then typing in diskmgmt.msc in the

Run box that opens. Press Enter.

Doing this will open the Disk Management window where you should be able to

locate your external drive, irrespective of whether it contains any partitions or not.

If you are not able to find the drive, you will have to format it properly so that it

can be recognized.

If you do see the drive here, you can continue to the last section where we’ll format it properly so Windows or your other devices can access and recognize it.

How to Make the Drive Recognizable in Windows

A few reasons why Windows is unable to see your drive could be hardware issues in

the USB port, driver problems in Windows or a dead drive.

You can know if your USB port is dead or not by simply plugging your drive into

another port. If it works, then your first port has problems. If you are using a USB,

trying plugging in directly.

If you want to see if there are issues with your Windows PC, try plugging the drive

into another windows PC. If you do not have another PC to test with, then the next

option is to update your drivers through the Disk Management Tool and see if it

works. You can also try to restore your computer. It is likely that one of these

methods help you get rid of the ‘hard drive is not recognized’ (festplatte wird

nicht erkannt) error.

For more info: www.datenrettung-festplatte.ch