HDD detected, shows up in device manager, disk management but NOT my computer. No solution anywhere on the internet

brushpicks11 · Nov 2, 2016

There is not a single solution to this on the internet. I have spent the past 2 hours searching reading giving myself a headache.

I cannot format this drive it has my life on it. I don't know what happened but I plugged it in and bam nothing shows up.

I don't know how to attach screenshot but there's 4 partitions on it, 3 are unallocated (these are the partitions that contains the data) and 1 is healthy primary with the exact size of the space I had free.

The change drive is greyed out and my only option is to delete that partition.

Now my question here (besides what the crap do I do?!) is if I delete that partition would it end up affecting the other partitions that are unallocated? Could I delete that healthy primary partition that contains the exact size of the free space on the HDD and assign it a letter and have the HDD show up with all the files intact?

I super appreciate any help because I can not find an answer to this. Asking this question is my last resort before I have to overpay some dude to recover all the files for me.

I have never used it on a MAC, formatted on a windows and have always used it with windows, I seriously don't know what to do anymore.

Thank you!

Tomhueb · Nov 2, 2016

ok i had this problem yesterday. Use wd acronis and select new disk on program and go onto HDD and completely wipe the drive by deleting all partitions on it. Then go into device manager and make a new simple volume and set a drive letter. (make sure you back up first) (if you can)

brushpicks11 · Nov 2, 2016

Tomhueb :

That's the thing, I can't delete all the data. It's still on the drive, I've run the mini tool partition wizard drive check and there's ZERO errors. The drive is perfectly in tact. I can't backup the drive because I can't access the files and I can't clone the drive because I don't have anything with 1.6tb of free space on it.

SuperSoph_WD · Nov 9, 2016

Hey there, @brushpicks11!

This sounds pretty unfortunate!

Have you also tried running the HDD's brand-specific diagnostic tool to determine the health and SMART stats from there as well? It might also be a good idea to check how the HDD would get recognized if you use a different USB cable and check how it will get detected on another compute running Windows OS.

If the files on the drive are so important, you could also try running a third-party data recovery tool AT YOUR OWN RISK. Unfortunately nobody can determine how successful the procedure will be. Another thing that helps a lot of users when dealing with similar issues is a Ubuntu Live CD.

Don't forget to backup all your data from the HDD somewhere else as soon as you gain access to it! Always make sure that you have at least two copies of your files stored in different storage location.

Hope it helps you too. Keep us posted with the troubleshooting!
SuperSoph_WD

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HDD detected, shows up in device manager, disk management but NOT my computer. No solution anywhere on the internet

brushpicks11

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