The computer does not see the hard drive: what is the reason and how to fix it. What to do if the computer does not see the hard drive Why the computer does not see the hard drive

Question from a user...

Hello. My 1 TB Seagate Expansion external hard drive (without power adapter) was purchased in 2015. Since then it has worked well, I have used it as additional memory for music, photos, videos (I have a computer and a laptop - it’s convenient to transfer data between them).

The other day I connect it to a USB port and see that the computer does not see the external hard drive at all! I tried to connect it to the laptop - the same thing, even the LED does not light up. Could you please tell me what could be the reason, how can I fix it (didn’t drop the disc, didn’t hit it, didn’t splash it, generally handled it very carefully)?

There are no particularly necessary documents on the disk, but a large archive of interesting files accumulated recently.

Thank you in advance.

Good day!

In general, there are quite a few reasons why this could happen: for example, the USB cord has become unusable. In this article I will try to give the most basic reasons why such a problem of “invisibility” arises. By going through them, you and many other users will be able to fix a similar problem yourself, which will save you time and money ✌.

Problem with hardware // can be identified by external signs

The first thing I want to start this article with is with "external signs" , because it is by them that you can determine whether there are problems with the hardware itself. Yes, and you see them earlier than all other parameters and settings in Windows.

When connecting a drive to a USB port, you must:

To help!

Repairing an external hard drive at home // an attempt to restore functionality -

Why all the above written: It’s just that if, when connecting a disk to several computers, it does not show any signs of life (the LED does not light up, the sound of movement inside is inaudible), then there is no point in looking further for the reason for its “invisibility”, because There is clearly a problem with the hardware (with the wires, with the disk itself, with the USB ports).

Drive letter conflict

Each storage medium: hard disk, optical disk, floppy disk, etc. - when connecting to a computer, a letter is automatically assigned (C:\, D:\, E:\, etc.). It happens that Windows, as a result of some kind of failure or conflict, assigns the wrong letter (or doesn't do it at all!)- as a result, the media is not displayed. Moreover, this happens not so rarely...

How to open Disk Management (Windows 7/8/10):

1. press buttons Win+R;
2. enter the command diskmgmt.msc;
3. press Enter(see screenshot below).

Select your external hard drive from the list of drives (if it is not there, go to the next point in the article: the problem with drivers), right-click on this line and select from the pop-up context menu "Change drive letter or drive path..." (as in the screenshot below).

After that, select any other letter and click change (see screenshot below).

To help!

My computer does not display external drives and flash drives because... Windows does not assign letters to connected drives -

File system problem

IN disk management Notice how the drive is displayed. If there is a black bar above it and it says “Not allocated”, this means that the disk is simply not formatted.

If the hard drive is new - this happens quite often (not all manufacturers format the disk).

To format a disk - in disk management select it in the list and right-click on it, then click on the option "Create Simple Volume"(see screenshot below).

Note! Formatting will delete all data on the disk! If you had files on it before, then most likely there was a failure, try first correcting the errors on the disk, more on that below.

In the next step, you will need to specify the drive letter (choose any free one), the file system (I recommend NTFS), and set the volume size (usually on external hard drives this parameter is not changed, making one single volume for the entire disk size).

To help!

How to format a hard drive: methods -

If your external hard drive has already been formatted , and you have not already copied files to it, then the display of “unmarked area” (or RAW file system) may occur due to:

• incorrectly disconnecting the disk from the USB port (for example, when information was being copied and you suddenly “pulled out” the USB cord);
• a power outage could occur: for example, during a power outage or surge;
• when infected with certain types of viruses;
• in case of hardware failure.

Most often, however, the display of the RAW file system is associated with improper disconnection of the disk. In this case, as a rule, it is possible to quickly correct errors and bring the disk back to life.

How to check the disk (data will not be deleted, everything will remain in place!)

First you need to run command line.:

1. press a combination of buttons Win+R ;
2. enter in the open line cmd click Enter.

Next, in the command line, type the command chkdsk e:/f(Where " e:" is the letter of your drive). The check takes only a few minutes. In many cases, after such a simple procedure, the computer begins to see the disk, files and folders remain safe and sound.

Disk check // chkdsk

An alternative option for running the scan: go to "My Computer", right-click on the disk (which you want to check) and select from the menu properties(see screenshot below).

A few words about TV

In my practice, I came across another interesting reason due to which the disk becomes invisible. A new modern TV (with some SmartTV functions) - when connecting the disk, asked the user to agree with its layout. He agreed, and everything seemed to be recorded normally on him.

But when I connected the disk to the computer, it refused to see it. The bottom line is that the TV formatted the disk into a different file system. After formatting to the NTFS file system, everything began to work as it should. (the problem is fixed - also through disk management, no additional programs are required).

Driver conflict or missing

If your external hard drive is not visible in disk management - I recommend checking whether the drivers are installed on it.

A small note...

In general, Windows 7, 8, 10, when you connect a flash drive or the same external drive to a computer, drivers are automatically installed. But in some cases, this does not happen (it’s difficult to say why, either the disk is not “ordinary” and there are no standard drivers for it in the system’s stash, or some kind of error occurs and a conflict with other drivers occurs, or because for what...).

If the driver for your disk is not installed, then disk management you won't find your disk!!!

To check the driver installation, open device Manager . For this:

1. press a combination of buttons WIN+R ;
2. in the window that appears, enter the command devmgmt.msc and press Enter(screen below, works in Windows 7, 8, 10).

To help!

How to open Device Manager (including in Windows 10): several ways -

IN device manager open the tab "Disk devices". Next, pay attention to:

• Is your device in the list, is it displayed at all;
• Also check the "Other Devices" tab - it displays devices for which there are no drivers.
• Is there a yellow exclamation mark next to your disk (if there is, it means the driver for your disk is not installed). An example is shown in the screenshot below.

Left: everything is fine with the driver (WD Elements) // Right: no driver (yellow exclamation mark) WD My Passport

How to update the disk driver:

Lack of nutrition

Quite often, problems with external drives occur due to lack of power. Especially if you have several devices connected to one USB port at once.

A characteristic feature when there is a lack of power: the disk appears to be displayed normally at first, but as soon as you want to copy or read something to it, it becomes inaccessible (or simply freezes).

How to fix the problem: try buying a Y-shaped cord (photo below) and connect the drive to two USB ports at once. This happened to me with some drives that became invisible after a few seconds when I tried to connect them to the USB ports of the laptop.

Y-shaped USB cord for connecting an external HDD

Advice! If you connect an external HDD to a laptop and it doesn’t see it, try connecting it to a desktop computer (or other device). It is possible that on another device the disk will work as expected.

A USB splitter with an additional power source can also be a good solution. An example of such a splitter is shown in the photo below.

PS

Some types of viruses (and antiviruses, by the way) can block the connection of external media and devices. Therefore, I also recommend:

1. try connecting your drive to another PC/laptop;
2. check your PC for viruses using alternative software. How to do this is described in this instruction: .

This concludes the article, I hope you solve the problem (or at least find out what the reason is)!

Let's look at SMART, attribute No. 5 is important, if its value is below the threshold, the screw will soon die. Let's start testing the HDD. If bad blocks are found on it (on the hard drive), and quite a lot, then testing should be stopped and the computer restarted with another program: “HDD Regenerator 2011”.

There you should select “Scanning with treatment of bad blocks”

Of course, if the information is very important to you, I would recommend that you first clone the faulty hard drive to a new working one of the same or larger size. And work with a clone.

To clone, you will have to download “Hiren boot cd” and select “Mini Windows” there. The best cloning program, in my opinion, is Winhex v 12 - 15. She misses Badblocks. With a clone things will go much faster. And if the clone still won’t boot, then you will need information recovery programs.

Hard drive recovery programs

The best of them, in my opinion, are ZAR and R-Studia. First, we scan the surface, then check the boxes for the required files and restore them to a physically different disk. There is no need to restore Windows and program files. The main thing is content. If one byte in a program (executable file) is wrong, the consequences may be unforeseen. The wrong byte in a picture, document, or film is often invisible.

What if the surface is fine, but Windows won’t boot? Load “Hiren boot cd” again and select “Mini Windows”. What if all the folders and files are visible, intact, just because of a failure, system files, the boot record, or the destructive actions of viruses are damaged?

If the files are not visible, the disk appears unallocated and unformatted, then we begin to restore using ZAR or R-Studia on another computer or by installing a clean operating system with drivers on the new disk. Or maybe you are not so careless and you still have the image of six months ago or earlier with or Norton Ghost?

Then, we restore the image to a new disk, connect the faulty one with the second one, boot from the new one and try to extract information from the old one. If the volume of the new hard drive is 2–3 times larger than the faulty one, then the information can be saved to the 2nd partition.

To summarize: for recovery you will need two disks, when working with a clone (my choice) three. If you do not want to entrust your information to strangers, and the price of hard drive recovery does not suit you, you will have to spend money.

However, half of the country's computer population consists of laptop owners. I will not describe in detail what to do with a laptop hard drive and how to carry out preventive maintenance and inspection - this is a matter for professionals. Most users do not have special screwdrivers, and you should not unscrew the back cover with a kitchen knife.

But still, if you removed the back cover of the laptop and removed the hard drive from there, the best thing to do would be to connect it to the computer - all the connectors are identical and start testing and restoring, as I described above. Meanwhile, test the memory on the laptop. Of course, it is advisable to clean the contacts on memory dies. Important! Insert memory dies in the order in which they were placed, even if they are exactly the same. Same steps in BIOSE with ACHI and UEFI. Don't forget to return them to the state they were before installing the corrected hard drive.

Reading time: 7 minutes. Views 175 Published 08/23/2017

Hi all! Today we’ll look at a fairly common problem that almost every second user of personal computers and laptops faces. It lies in the fact that the computer does not see the hard drive. Very often, when turning on the PC, instead of loading the operating system, the user sees a black screen with the words “ Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key" This abusive phrase from the computer means that it does not see our hard drive. Accordingly, the operating system cannot load. Therefore, in today’s article we will try to find out the reason why this problem occurs and we will try to find ways to solve it.

The computer does not see the hard drive. Main reasons.

Since the hard drive is one of the important components of any computer, then, accordingly, if it fails, the user’s further work on it stops, and in order to continue it, it will be necessary to identify the reason why the computer does not see the hard drive and try to fix it. eliminate the cause. Let's look at the most common problems that cause this trouble:

• Hard drive failure;
• The problem is in the cable;
• Incorrect BIOS setting;
• Lack of nutrition;
• Conflicting devices;
• Problems with the operating system;

As you can see, there are not so many reasons, therefore, identifying what your problem is will not be so difficult. The main thing is to follow the tips and recommendations described in this article.

Hard drive failure

From my experience I can say the following: failure of hard drives is a fairly common cause of computer breakdowns. Therefore, if your computer no longer sees the hard drive, then the simplest thing you can do is connect it to another PC. If the disk is seen by another computer, then I can congratulate you, not everything is so bad.

Firstly, the information stored on your disk has not disappeared anywhere, and secondly, most likely the problem can be solved quite easily if you follow the instructions below.

If the other computer refuses to see your hard drive. In this case, things are bad, a physical breakdown has probably occurred and repairs cannot be done, and you may have to buy a new disk.

Motherboard failure.

Very often, the computer does not see the hard drive because the Sata ports on the motherboard fail. To exclude or confirm this problem, first of all we connect the cable to any other port and try to turn on the computer. If the hard drive is detected and the operating system starts to load, then probably one of the Sata slots has failed and the motherboard will need to be repaired, or you can leave everything as it is and continue working on the computer.

The cable is damaged.

To be honest, I haven’t encountered many cases of damaged IDE and SATA cables in my practice, but they have happened. Most often, the connectors themselves were damaged. All this arose due to improper connection of devices by users.

Therefore, first of all, we disconnect the cable from the hard drive and motherboard and inspect it for damage. If you see any defects, we replace the cable with a new one.

If there is no visible damage, then in order to check the serviceability of the cable connecting the hard drive to the computer’s motherboard, we simply take a similar, known-to-be-good cable and connect our hard drive.

If there was a problem in the lace, then the disk will certainly work, and the problem will be solved by itself.

Note! If your system unit has a DVD drive, then the SATA cable can be taken from it.

Incorrect BIOS setting

After we have examined the mechanical part and found that the hard drive itself is working, we replaced the cable with a new one, and also made sure that the ports are working, but the computer does not see the hard drive, then most likely the problem is software. Therefore, the first thing you need to do is check the BIOS settings.

If the system has several HDDs installed and only one of them has an operating system, then most likely after a failure, the device boot parameters have changed. To check this, when starting the computer, press the “F2” or “Delete” key and get into the BIOS settings.

Note! Very often, it is quite easy to determine a failure if you pay attention to the date and time that are displayed on the main BIOS page; as a rule, they will not correspond to the actual data.

In the BIOS we are interested in the BOOT section, in which we need to put our hard drive in first place. After this, save the settings by pressing the “F10” key. By the way, for those who don’t know how to correctly set the disk boot order in different versions, read the article: “”. It tells you in detail how to make the settings, but instead of a flash drive you need to select our HDD.

After the computer restarts, the hard drive should be detected and the system will start working.

Lack of nutrition

Since the key is a good power supply, if it does not work properly, there may not be enough power for the components of the system unit or laptop, in particular the hard drive. Because of this, the hard drive may not work correctly: it may randomly disappear and reappear in the system, Windows blue screens of death may appear, and the disk may make a buzzing sound that occurs due to changing operating cycles.

All this indicates poor HDD power supply. To fix this problem, install a new power supply or have the old one repaired. If it is not possible to replace the power supply, then I recommend disconnecting all unnecessary devices: DVD drive, extra HDDs and other volatile devices.

Conflicting devices.

A fairly rare phenomenon, but still occurring from time to time, is a conflict between two identical hard drives. To solve this problem, connect each drive one by one and wait for them to install on the system.

Operating system problems.

The last option in which the computer does not see the hard drive is problems with the Windows operating system. If the connected drive is not detected automatically in the system, it is possible that the drive is new and not yet formatted, the drive letter is not assigned, or the drive is not active.

To check this, do the following:

Note! If you bought a new hard drive and connected it to your computer, then most likely the disk is not partitioned. To do this, first of all, in the “Disk Management” window, select the desired disk, right-click on it and select “Create partition”, only after that we format it and set the drive letter.

If the disk is not new, before using it, make sure that there is nothing valuable on it, since after formatting you will lose all data.

Let's summarize.

Today we looked at the main reasons why the computer does not see the hard drive. As you can see, diagnosing the problem and understanding why exactly the disk is not working is quite simple. Very often everything is limited to moving the cable to neighboring ports or correctly configuring the system.

There are cases in which a normally turned on computer, after a normal boot process, displays the message “ Operating system not found". This can only tell us that our OS was unable to detect the required system files to boot. If in your practice you have encountered this kind of problem, then thanks to these instructions you can get rid of this problem.

Reasons why Windows 7 will not be able to see the hard drive

There are several reasons why the system does not see the hard drive:

1. The hard drive is damaged
2. The Master Boot Record (MBR) of Sector O is damaged or has errors.
3. Incorrectly set priority of disks responsible for which disk the operating system will be loaded from.
4. It also often happens that in BIOS There is an error in your computer, and because of it there is no way to detect the hard drive.
5. Among the hardware reasons, we can name the following: the interface cable that connects the computer and the hard drive is damaged, then it needs to be replaced and checked. And for SATA It is best to choose a cable that has metal latches.
6. If you just installed a new hard drive and did not have time to properly prepare it and create partitions, then Windows 7 definitely won't see him. To solve this issue, simply download the program Acronis Disc Director and quickly split our disk into partitions. Just don't mix up the discs!

Now let's try to solve the problem. To begin with, we need to find the item "" by clicking on the icon " My computer» using the right button of your mouse.

Then in the paragraph " Computer management", select the sub-item "". Next, feel free to right-click on the required disk and then select an item such as “ Change drive letter«.

You definitely can't go wrong further. In order to swap two disks, you will have to rename them several times. First, you will need to replace the letter on any of the drives with an unallocated one: drive “D”, for example, change to “X”, and drive “E” to “D”, then you can change the former drive “D”, and now "X" - to "E".

Windows 7 does not detect hard drive after system reinstallation

Very often there are cases when, after reinstalling the OS, the hard drive ceases to be visible.Then it will help with this problemthis instruction.

1. If you have a case in which Windows 7 cannot detect the hard drive due to a conflict coming from the motherboard, then first try downloading the necessarydrivers for your computer's motherboard. Save them to disk and downloadthesedrivers to the root folder of your OS. To do this, insert your driver disk into the drive and after restarting the computer, click the " F6«.

Another way to solve the problem. While the computer is booting, you need to go toBIOS (read how to do this), and in the settings of the system itself, find the parameter responsible for disablingAHCI, and only when you disable this setting will the hard drive be found immediately. You will see how to do this in the pictures below.

If this does not help you, then you need to tackle such a difficult task as integrating driversSATA, or even have to download entire driver packages. Also, there is a possibility that integrating all driver packages along with their updates will help. And they need to be integrated into the OS distribution using any of the methods presented below.

In order to select the necessary drivers and updates, you need to go to the website of your motherboard manufacturer (to quickly find out the motherboard model, read).

The solution to this problem is not as difficult as it seems at first glance. In most cases, users who have installed or reinstalled the operating system encounter this problem. Don’t immediately panic and call service centers to have a specialist come to your home, first try BIOS disable option like AHCI, then try to integrate all the motherboard drivers into your computer's distribution.

If the above does not help, then try to determine how the connector is connected HDD, and how correct. This very device, thanks to which it is possible to connect a hard drive to the motherboard, has only two connectors - black and blue, which should be connected to the hard drive, since it works more stably.

Every computer uses a hard drive that stores software and other files needed to function. Note that this component is very sensitive, and problems with it often arise. This is explained by the presence of elements moving at high speed inside the disk. One possible problem is when the computer does not see the hard drive. Why does this happen and how to solve it? Let's talk about this.

Problem with connection interface or power supply

First you need to check whether the disk is working. To do this, you need to connect it to another computer. This is not difficult to do: just remove 4 (or even 2) screws, pull out the power cable and SATA cable and connect it to another computer. If he sees the disk, then this will clearly indicate a problem with the computer from which the drive was removed.

Why doesn't the computer see the hard drive if another system was able to notice it? There may be several reasons:

There is a small chance that after these manipulations the hard drive will work. These are the most basic operations that a user can quickly take to solve this problem. If nothing helps and it is still unknown why the computer does not see the hard drive, then you need to look deeper for the reason.

BIOS Settings

BIOS may well be the reason why the computer does not see the hard drive. Therefore, its settings must either be changed or reset. The last option is the simplest. To do this, restart the computer, enter the BIOS (usually you need to press F2 or Del when rebooting) and look for the “Load Optimized Defaults” menu item. It can also be the line "Load Optimal Defaults". We select this item, press Enter, the system asks us for confirmation, we agree. Now press F10 (save and exit), confirm the action, the computer reboots again. The system will then be able to see the hard drive, after which it will boot.

No interface support

If the computer does not see the hard drive, the reason may be the SATA interface, which older operating systems cannot work with. However, there is an opinion that this problem can be solved by downloading drivers for SATA or installing a Windows distribution kit in which the necessary drivers are preinstalled. However, the easiest option is to install a more recent operating system (Windows 7, for example), where the necessary drivers are available by default.

By the way, the lack of drivers in the system is possible if pirated copies of software are used in the form of various assemblies from unknown users.

Device conflict

If several hard drives from different manufacturers are connected to the computer via different SATA interfaces, then a device conflict may occur. It is quite easy to check whether this is actually the case. To do this, you need to disconnect each drive in turn and see how the system reacts to this. It may turn out that after disconnecting the first disk, the operating system will freely detect the second drive, and when disconnecting the second, it will see the first without any problems. In this case, the reason why the computer does not see the new hard drive will be obvious - a device conflict. If the disk is new, then it is advisable to replace it with another one - from the same manufacturer as the main one.

Operating system problems

In some cases, it is not clear why the computer does not see the hard drive; Windows boots at the same time, and information about it is displayed in the BIOS. In this case, there is a problem with the operating system. You can try to solve this problem using Windows itself.

To do this, open the “Control Panel” and go to the “Administration” section. There is a "Computer Management" item. Select it and see “Disk Management” in the tree on the left. Right-click on it, a context menu will appear, click on “Change drive letter or path”. A new window opens in which we can change the drive letter. Specify a new letter, click "OK", and restart the computer.

In some cases this helps solve the problem, but not always. This solution works when the system already has another device (for example, a DVD drive) that is assigned the letter D, which is used to designate the default primary disk partition.

When the disk is not enabled by the system

If you connect an additional hard drive, the system may crash and not prepare it. However, this can also be done manually. To do this, go to the same “Disk Management” section. All disks connected to the computer will be displayed there - working or not. If there is a line “No data” next to the additional disk, this means that it has not been initialized. Right-click on it and select “Initialize”.

It may also say “Not allocated” next to the disk. Right-click on it, select the “Create simple volume” option and follow the system instructions.

If the RAW disk system is specified, this means that the drive must be formatted with the NTFS or FAT32 file system. Right-click on it and select the “Format” option. In this case, all information from the drive will be deleted.

If the computer does not see the external hard drive

Note that an external drive is a more modern analogue of a flash drive. It connects via USB interface. Therefore, if the computer does not see the external hard drive, then first of all you need to try to connect it to another USB port.

If this does not help, then you need to change the drive letter. The above describes how to do this. It is also worth considering that the new disk may not be formatted. You will have to do this yourself. You need to format it in FAT32 or NTFS in the same “Disk Management” section. Be careful, as formatting permanently deletes all data from the disk.

Lack of drivers is another reason why the computer does not see the hard drive. What to do in this case? Yes, you just need to install the drivers. Perhaps the external hard drive came with a disk with utilities - they need to be installed. If there is no disk, then the necessary “firewood” can be found on the Internet, downloaded and installed. And although in 90% of cases Windows automatically connects external hard drives (the drivers are already in the system), sometimes it happens that applications need to be downloaded yourself.

Finally

These are the main reasons why the computer does not see the hard drive. You now know what to do in these cases, but if nothing works and the system still cannot recognize the presence of the drive, then a hardware failure of the device cannot be ruled out. It can be determined absolutely accurately by connecting the drive to another computer. And even if another system could not recognize it, then it is clearly broken. However, if it is new, it will definitely be replaced under warranty. As for old disks that are more than 5 years old, you shouldn’t worry about them, since they don’t last very long. Drives are extremely sensitive devices and have moving parts inside them. And if we are talking about SSD drives, then these have a limited service life, since memory cells disappear when recording and erasing information.

In general, now you understand why the computer does not see the hard drive and how to fix this problem. Note that this is a common phenomenon, which in most cases can be solved using software.