Toshiba 2tb External Hard Drive isn't showing anymore

zombiedisco187

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Nov 21, 2013
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10,510
So all day I've been looking for an answer to my little problem and didn't really come across anything that linked to mine. Basically yesterday I copied some stuff to the my Toshiba 2tb stor e canvio usb 3.0 external hard drive and it was working perfectly, unplugged it and put it into my blu ray player and again it worked like normal.

However about 10pm last night I wanted to copy something else to the drive (which was plugged in) and it wasn't showing up in my computer, which was a bit strange, so I unplugged it from my laptop and tried every other USB port. Still nothing happened, so I put it into my blu ray player and again it wasn't working (tried it with my HD TV and a desktop PC too still nothing).

Now the blue light on the front shows up when plugged in, it makes the same noise it always does since I got it (no clicking or anything like that - like a boot up noise) but nothing shows up in BIOS or disk management.

I've ordered another USB cable because the end that goes into the actual drive is a bit... bumpy (that's the best way to put it) so I'm taking a wild guess that this may be the problem (and if it does turn out to be a USB cable problem then I've wasted anyone's time that reads this)

I have another external HDD that works perfectly so I don't think it's the actual USB ports. This hard drive is only a few months old so it's kinda sucky that it stopped working -- but I understand that nothing lasts forever (especially when it comes to technology, though my other HDD has lasted for 3 years.) So yeah any advice will be very appreciated
 
You are heading to the right direction, see what happens with the USB cable. If that solves your problem then there is nothing to say, but if the problem persists then you can try to Open/break the caddy/case of the external drive, and connect it directly to the MB with (interface and power cable) as a second HDD in a Desktop system. See how it works. Good luck.
 

zombiedisco187

Honorable
Nov 21, 2013
3
0
10,510


So I tried a new USB cable and sadly it didn't work. I'm going to try the other option soon. It still boggles my mind that the hard drive is booting up like normal yet nothing happens.

 

zombiedisco187

Honorable
Nov 21, 2013
3
0
10,510


Well my new computer arrived today and the first thing I did was insert the external hard drive into it, and sadly it still didn't work. Checked the BIOS and computer management to see any signs but nothing. I brought a USB to Sata cable and plugging the hard drive into that it comes up either as unknown device (with code 43 error) or USB storage device with (i/o device error) by all accounts I'm assuming the hard drive is pretty much buggered. So I may just give up trying to get it to work.

Anyways thank you Lonewolf7 for the responses and advice