That said, there are usually reasons in your operating system that can cause a hard drive not to show. If your external hard drive isn’t showing up, many things could be causing the issue, including problems with your computer, a hard drive that’s dead on arrival, a fault cable and more. Why Your External Hard Drive Isn’t Showing Up The steps are mostly the same for Windows and macOS, but we’ve covered both so you don’t get lost.īefore getting to that, though, we want to discuss the reasons your hard drive may not be showing up.
In this guide on how to solve an external hard drive not showing up, we’re going to go over the major troubleshooting steps you should take before returning your disk. It’s the nature of the beast, unfortunately, and though it can be disappointing to see nothing after unboxing your shiny, new external hard drive, the solution is likely only a few clicks away. No matter how extensively we test our best external hard drives for errors, some units will have problems.
