Is your external hard drive showing not responding error? Read more to know the effective 6 solutions and also secure your valuable data with reliable data recovery utility like Remo Recover. The write-up has descriptive insights on the solutions for fixing the not responding error on the hard drive
When you connect an external hard drive to your Windows 10 computer, sometimes it may not work as expected and produce an error “not responding”. You try to reconnect the device multiple times, but the error still seems to persist. Though your computer detects the hard drive and is visible in My Computer, it doesn’t respond. Even when you connect it to another computer, the issue persists. How to fix a non-responding external hard drive?
Well, in this article, we have explained 2 different methods to troubleshoot the problem. But before we proceed, it is advisable to recover data from the USB device as a first step. To help you achieve this, Remo Recover serves as a fantastic tool. It is designed to recover data from USBs that are not responding or are unrecognizable. The software performs a deep scan of the drive and recovers all data along with the original structure. So, you will have no trouble identifying the required files after recovery or repairing files after recovery.
All your files like photos, videos, documents, .exe files, etc. can be recovered by the software. Moreover, the tool supports all brands of USBs like SanDisk, Samsung, Transcend, HP, Sony, Toshiba, etc. Now that we’ve seen how the software works, let us move on to the steps to recover deleted files from the external hard drive.
However, to protect your external hard drive from complete failure, follow the listed solutions given in the below section. We first recommend you recover your data, then go ahead with troubleshooting the external hard drive.
Following are a few reasons that can result in the external HDD not responding issue:
Note - We first recommend you recover data from an external hard drive that says not responding and then go ahead with fixing the error. Any interruption, formatting, or misuse of command prompt solutions can cause permanent data loss from the logical memory of the drive.
Note – If you are unable to find the external hard drive, click on the Can’t Find Drive option and then choose the external drive
Once you have recovered data using Remo Recover, you are all set to troubleshoot the ‘not responding’ error on the external hard drive.
Once you have recovered data using Remo Recover, you are all set to troubleshoot the ‘not responding’ error on the external hard drive.
Before going ahead with any listed solutions, connect the external hard drive to a working operating system.
Having a fault USB setting may affect the read-write functionalities of the operating system. One of the main reasons for the external hard drive not responding. Hence, uninstalling and reinstalling the USB device through Device Manager may help you resolve the error. To do so, follow the steps below.
Then check if you’re able to access your USB, if not you can proceed to the next step.
Bad sectors are one of the reasons for the external hard drive to not respond. If your external hard drive is corrupted or contains bad sectors, you can diagnose and repair it by running a disk check-up. Follow the listed methods to do so
/R command will help you get rid of corruption issues as well as deal with bad sectors. So, this command is run, you should ideally be able to access data on your drive provided the issues were related to corruption.
Virus intrusion can cause serious damage or data loss to your external hard drive, we recommend you to connect the external hard drive to a working operating system and Run the antivirus test, so you can evaluate the results and eliminate the virus-infected files.
If the error still persists, we recommend you recover data using a reliable data recovery utility and go ahead with formatting the external hard-drive
Device drivers are the vital components that operate or control a particular type of device that is attached to a computer. Due to faulty device driver settings, you may encounter this issue. Hence, to eradicate this possibility, we recommend you reinstall the device drivers
In the search box on the taskbar, enter Device Manager, then select Device Manager.
Due to faulty external hard drive settings, you may encounter the operating system being unable to detect the external hard drive. By changing the drive letter you may evade the problem.
Formatting is considered the last resort to solve the error, even after trying all the above-listed methods, if you still encounter the error. We recommend you format the disk after recovering your valuable data as mentioned in the above section.
Note - If you are wondering how to make your external hard-drive compatible with Windows and Mac, click on the link here for the hassle-free guide.
With these workarounds, you can usually get your external hard drive to respond. If it does not, then maybe the drive is damaged. Before you proceed further, with troubleshooting the external HDD, make sure you have your entire data recovered using Remo Recover hard drive recovery tool. That way, even if something goes wrong, you don’t have to worry about losing data.