How to Fix an External Hard Drive Not Showing Up
Find a missing USB hard drive or SSD in Disk Management, assign a letter if needed, and know when "format this disk" would destroy your files.
External Drives
USB hard drives and SSDs that do not appear or ask to be formatted.
Start with the closest symptom
These guides are grouped here because the first checks overlap. Open the guide that best matches what you see now, then use its verification section before moving to a broader fix.
Related tools
- File Extension Lookup, Look up common Windows file extensions and see what they usually are, what opens them, and when to be careful.