Fix External Hard Drive Not Working – Expert Solutions

I. The reason why the mobile hard disk does not respond/does not work

If your mobile hard disk does not respond or does not work, it may be caused by the following reasons:

● There is a problem with the connection between the mobile hard disk and the computer.

● The hard disk has bad sectors.

● Virus damage or malware infection.

● The hard disk is overheated.

● Outdated/corrupted drivers. You can view the steps to update the hard disk program.

● Mechanical or physical errors.

Below we will troubleshoot the simplest connection problem. If this problem cannot be solved, the hard disk may be faulty. Please checkthe third part hard disk failure repair method.

II. Check the connection between the mobile hard disk and the computer

If your external hard disk suddenly fails to work or cannot be displayed on the computer, you should first check the connection between the external hard disk and the computer. Please follow the method below to check the connection between the mobile hard disk and the computer to see if the mobile hard disk can be recognized by the computer.

1. Check and replace the connecting cable of the mobile hard disk

The first thing you should do is check the external hard drive USB connection cable:

● If the connection cable is loose, reconnect the external hard drive to the computer and make sure the connection is secure.

● Check whether the external USB connection cable is broken or damaged, if damaged, please replace it with a new one, and then reconnect the mobile hard disk to the computer.

2. Change the USB port or connect to another computer to check

If there is no problem with the USB connection cable, try reconnecting the external drive to another USB port on the computer and check if the computer detects your drive. If still nothing happens, please connect the external hard drive to another computer to check. This operation can troubleshoot whether it is a connection problem or a problem with the mobile hard disk.

3. Check the power management settings of the USB hub

If the mobile hard disk still does not work properly or cannot be recognized by other computers after changing the USB port, it may also be a problem with the power management settings of the USB hub, please check the following solutions.

Step 1: Please press (Windows + R) to open “Run”, type (devmgmt.msc), and press (Enter).

Step 2: In Device Manager, expand the (Universal Serial Bus Controllers) list, and then double-click (USB Root Hub (USB 3.0)). After that, in the properties interface that pops up, click the (Power Management) tab, uncheck (Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power), and then click (OK). This action prevents the system from automatically disconnecting USB devices to save power.

After following the three solutions above, most connection problems can be resolved, and you can try to open the hard drive and access data. If it still cannot be recognized, it may be that the hard disk is faulty, and you can follow the methods below to repair the hard disk fault.

III. How to repair the failure of the mobile hard disk

1. Run antivirus software

Sometimes viruses and malware can cause hard drive failure. Therefore, scanning and removing viruses with antivirus software may fix some corrupted hard drives. It is recommended to connect the mobile hard disk to another Windows computer with antivirus software installed, and use reliable antivirus software to scan and remove viruses.

2. Use hard disk detection/repair software

If the hard disk has bad sectors, you can use special hard disk detection/repair software to detect and repair hard disk errors.

Step 1: Connect the mobile hard disk to the computer, download, install and run the hard disk bad sector detection tool on the computer, the free tool recommended here is: HDD-SCAN, it is a free software for hard disk drive diagnosis (also supports RAID array servers, flash USB and SSD drives). The program can test storage devices for errors (bad blocks and sectors), display SMART attributes and change some HDD parameters such as AAM, APM, etc.

Official website link: https://hddscan.com/

Step 2: HDD-SCAN can output the scanning status to the interface in a graphical way. When the disk detects about 78%, there are a lot of bad sectors (B).

Step 3: HDD-Scan can also output scan logs, and the results are more detailed. After bad sectors are found, it is recommended to use the repair software provided by the hard disk brand to deal with them, such as SeaTools, Western Digital Data Lifeguard Diagnostic, etc. Please search the corresponding hard disk repair tools on the Internet according to the hard disk brand. Note: All data may be erased if repaired with repair software provided by the brand. If you don’t want to lose data, please back up your data first.

3. Use Windows built-in disk checking tool

You can try to use the Windows built-in Disk Check tool to check and fix external hard drive errors. Please do the following:

Step 1: Connect the mobile hard disk to the computer, press (Windows icon + R key) on the keyboard, please enter (diskmgmt.msc) in the pop-up input box, and then click (OK) to enter the disk management.

Step 2: In Disk Management, right-click on the failed hard disk partition and select (Properties) on the menu.

Step 3: In the (Tools) column, select (Inspect).

Step 4: If your system is Windows 7 or Windows 8, please check (Automatically repair file system errors) and (Scan and try to recover bad sectors), and Windows 10 automatically repairs all errors by default. Then wait for the inspection and repair to complete.

The disk check function is mainly to mark the space where bad sectors appear as unusable at the file system level, so as to prevent file data from being written into these unstable data storage spaces. After repairing, if you use hard disk detection software such as HDD-Scan to scan, these bad sectors will still be displayed. If you want to completely solve the problem of bad sectors, you can only perform low-level formatting (not necessarily repairable) or replace the hard disk.

4. Run the chkdsk tool to repair hard disk errors

The chkdsk tool is a command for the Windows system to check the current state of the disk. It can display the disk state, memory state, and the number of discrete files in the specified path, and can also repair the disk. It is very simple to repair hard disk failure with the help of chkdsk tool. The specific operation steps are as follows:

Step 1: Connect the faulty hard disk to the computer, directly search (cmd) in the search box in the lower left corner, and select (run as administrator) to open the command prompt tool.

Step 2: In the opened command prompt window, enter the command ( chkdsk G: /f ) (G refers to the disk number of the hard disk), and press (Enter) to fix the error. After the repair process is complete, check to see if the problem is resolved.

After using the above steps to repair the mobile hard disk, if you find that the data in the mobile hard disk is lost, you can use the following methods to restore the data.

IV. How to restore the lost data in the mobile hard disk?

1. What is Renee Undeleter?

Rene.E Laboratory ™ data recovery software It is a software specially used to restore various data files. When you accidentally delete important files, empty the recycle bin, or format the disk/storage, you can use this tool to retrieve the lost data. The software covers four functional modules, including file recovery, format recovery, partition recovery and image creation, which can help you solve all data loss problems in an all-round way.

2. How to use Renee Undeleter to recover hard disk partition data?

Step 1: Download, install and run Renee Undeleter on the computer, and select the (Partition Recovery) option on the main interface.

Step 2: Next select the hard drive that needs to recover data. After the selection is complete, click (Next).

Step 3: Please wait patiently for the scan. This process will find out all the partitions that have existed in the hard disk, and then the “Select the partition you need to scan” window will pop up, and you can select a specific partition to scan. If not selected, all partitions will be scanned and it will take longer.

Step 4: You can preview the files during the scanning process. If all the required files have been found, you can check the target files and click the (Recover) button to restore the data in the mobile hard disk to other disks of the computer.