External hard disk Seagate of 4 TB does not appear on Windows Explorer

Question

I bought an external Hard Disk of 4 TB of the brand Seagate, it looks like the following picture:

I bought it like one year ago, and one day when I was copying one video file of approximately 1 Gb, the operation suddenly stopped and I was not able to see the contents of the Drive. So, I tried to use Recuva, but the process for recovering the files was going to take days; therefore, I tried another program called Stellar and it managed to recover the files in shorter time. The disk was working fine after that, but in some occasions it was not recognized by my OS which is Windows 8.

Approximately, a month ago the drive does not appear on the Windows Explore. I have tried different solutions, but none of them are working. For example, I plug the disk into another usb ports and nothing happened, the cable is working just fine and the disk only has its light stable and does not goes on and off.

Also, I when I enter into the disk manager, it seems that the driver appears, but it is in hidden devices like in the following picture:

I tried to delete the driver, reboot and nothing happens. Also, the search for hardware changes and check to see if the there is a current drives is not working. As a last resort I enter into diskpart:

However, the disk still does not appear. What can I do in this situation? Is it that the drive is dead? It is the first time that it happens to me with a Seagate drive, I have another one of 2 TB and it has like 4 years and is still working.

Any help? Thanks.

Answer 1

There are several reasons why an external hard drive may not be accessible or detected when you connect it to your computer.

A few things could be tried:

• Try connecting the drive to a different port on the computer.
• If possible, try using a different cable.
• Try using the drive on a different computer.
• Verify the drive light is on.
• Try a different power outlet.
• Within Device Manager look for any entries called unknown device, other device, or mass storage device with a yellow ! icon. Important - Make sure to expand the Universal Serial Bus controllers section so you can see entries there as well.
• If you see an unknown device or other device then right-click on it and select properties.
• Under the general tab locate ‘Device Status’ and there may be an error code.
• You may see a code 10 or 28.

If you see Code 10 and have already tried another cable and computer then the drive has probably failed.

If you see Code 28 (this may work for others codes too, i.e. Code 43) then try the following:

• Close the window with the code.
• Right-click on the device with the issue and select uninstall.
• Shut the computer down and disconnect the drive.
• Reboot with the drive disconnected.
• Once the computer is booted, plug the drive into a different port.
• You should see that Windows is installing device drivers.
• Once the driver loads, check to see if it is giving the same Code.