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“My hard drive doesn’t show up on my computer any longer. Is there a way to recover my files?”
Don’t worry! You probably have chances to get back your files all.
Sometimes, a hard drive would get corrupted due to virus attack, bad sectors and formatting/ reformatting issues, etc. In these cases, the inner data would be not be accessed easily. Hence, you are supposed to try plenty of ways to examine this drive and see if your data would be recoverable.
1. Change another USB cable
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Is there a clicking sound or spinning sound after plunging this drive to your computer?
Your drive may be not connected rightly because of the poor or bad connection. Therefore, you need to change another USB cable and see whether it could be recognized, if there is no any sound or spinning.
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2. Assign a new drive letter.
If you do hear a clicking or spinning sound, your problems absolutely cannot be caused by connection problems. So, you need to keep on checking your drive.
Right click “My Computer” and select “Manage”, Open “Disk Management” under “Computer Management” and then check whether this drive is shown on the right box.
If it shows up there, your drive problem could not be so serious. Right click it there and select “Change Drive Letters and Paths”.
In this situations, changing a drive letter would help reactivate your drive and make it workable again.
3. Run Windows Error-checking tool.
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If your drive cannot change or add a drive letter for some reason or even cannot be shown under “Disk Management” box, your drive probably got some physical problems, such as the bad sectors or hard drive scratching, etc.
You should try to run “Windows Error-checking tool”:
Right Click you drive in My Computer > Properties > Tools > Check Now > Mark “Automatically fix file system errors” and “Scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors”. This tool often could help resolve some basic drive problems. I hope your drive is not so seriously damaged.
4. Use a data recovery tool to restore your data back before formatting.
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If all of these methods listed above do not make a sense, your data may not be restored by yourself. Therefore, you could find a data recovery program to give yourself a hand. In fact, as a drive user, you must know some knowledge of data recovery software before. Nowadays, many data recovery programs could help us resolve many data recovery problems, such as accidental deleted data recovery problems, mistakenly formatted drive data recovery problems and other inaccessible data recovery problems.
Therefore, if you are curious about it, you could do some related searching and opt for a proper one for yourself.
At this point, I would recommend you to try some free drive data recovery programs, such as Recuva, TestDisk and iCare Data Recovery Free. My friend has ever tried iCare Data Recovery Free, which is actually free and restore all his needed data back from a logically damaged drive. So, Good luck!
5. Format this drive.
I hope you’ve retrieved all your wanted files back now!
Format this drive afterwards and check whether this drive could be used.
Tips: Important data always is supposed to be kept at least on two hard drives or safe locations. We often call it data “backups”. Therefore, don’t forget to make data backups in the future.