how to format external hard drive windows not showing up

Power On the Drive, if Necessary: Some external hard drives have their own power switches or separate power cables.If you don’t see the drive in the Disk Management window at all, try these troubleshooting steps: If you see yours, move onto the next section.

In the screenshot below, we’ve spotted our removable drive at “Disk 3”. Sometimes, it’ll also be marked as “Removable”, but not always. Look for a disk that matches the size of your flash drive. Even if it doesn’t show up in Windows Explorer, it should appear here. If you are having a similar issue on your hard drive, you may directly try the fixes below.Examine the list of disks in the disk management window and look for your external drive. It's detected but not accessible, so this time you must perform data recovery on the hard drive without delay. Sometimes, even the hard drive shows up in Disk Management, it's with strange characters like Unallocated, RAW, disk unknown not initialized, etc. Go to Windows Disk Management (This PC > Manage > Disk Management), check if the Seagate external hard drive shows as a normal hard disk there. After the process completes, restart your computer and the driver should be automatically installed and loaded on your computer. Click 'automatically search for driver software online.' Right-click and choose update driver software. Then you'll see a yellow exclamation mark. In Device Manager, next to Universal Serial Bus controller, click '+ (plus)'. In Run (Windows + R), type devmgmt.msc and hit Enter. And if not, you should first update the disk driver to make the Seagate external hard drive recognized by Windows and show up in disk management. The first thing you need to do is to check if it is showing up in disk management. Next, we will show you how to fix the issue without losing data. In fact, few people have encountered such a problem. As a result, the disk and the folders & files on it then become inaccessible. Sometimes, when you plug in your Seagate external hard drive to the PC, it cannot be recognized.

What should I do? In Device Manager, it gets detected and in disk management, it shows up as unallocated. Is there any way to fix the issue? If I initialize it, will I lose all the data on the drive? ' 'My 320 GB Seagate external hard drive is detected but not showing up in My Computer. How to fix Seagate external hard drive not showing up in Windows 10/11

How to format external hard drive windows not showing up