WD external hard drive not showing up. Suggestions?

lastKnownGood · 2025-08-11T07:07:02+00:00

First time posting. I’ve been lurking on the forum for a while, but now it’s my turn to ask for help. I have a WD My Passport 1TB external hard drive (newer...

nitev955

Not sure if anyone else will agree with me (they usually don’t lol), but I’m just gonna say it anyway, I’d try chkdsk.
(open Command Prompt and type chkdsk “drive letter”: /f)
I had a hard drive not showing up properly a while back (on Windows 10, not 11, but still), and chkdsk actually fixed it. I got kinda shushed in another thread before for recommending it 😅 but I’m just speaking from experience, it worked for me.

lastKnownGood

WD drive does show up in Disk Management. Here's a screenshot:
Shows up as 931.50 GB. I also ran CrystalDiskInfo, the status is blue Good (100% ), and all the SMART values are blue too.
So now I’m just confused… everything seems fine, but the hard drive is still not detected in File Explorer. What gives? If the drive is healthy, why isn't it working normally?

HopeInSleep

lastKnownGood Well, some good news. At least your drive’s physically fine. That SMART readout is what you want to see, and the fact that it’s showing in Disk Management with the correct size means we’re not dealing with a hardware failure. If it wasn’t showing up in Disk Management or CrystalDiskInfo flagged something bad, you’d have a whole lot more on your plate right now.
“Unallocated” label means there’s no partition table, so Windows doesn’t know how to read it… which is why the WD hard drive’s not showing up in File Explorer.

What’s likely going on here is that the partition got deleted or corrupted somehow. Could of been from disconnecting without ejecting or a power loss, don't know, hard to say. But, good news is, that’s recoverable in most cases.
Next step would be to scan it with recovery software, save your data somewhere else (on different drive), and once you’ve got yuor stuff off, just format it in Disk Management to NTFS or exFAT. That’s pretty much it. You’ll have a clean drive ready to use again.

edit: @nitev955 chkdsk can help in some cases, but in this one it’s not going to do anything. The drive doesn’t even have a partition right now, so there’s no file system for chkdsk to scan or repair.
All it would do is tell you it can’t run.

SocialImpactCoder

@lastKnownGood if you didn’t delete the partition yourself, it was probably something like an interrupted data transfer, maybe the drive was yanked out while something was still writing, or there was a power loss. That kind of thing can mess with the drive. And since your SMART data looks clean the hardware itself seems healthy.
You can totally just format the drive like @HopeInSleep said.
BUT only after you recover your data. I usually use Disk Drill for jobs like this. It’ll scan the whole drive and let you save whatever files it finds to a different drive.
Spoiler: you’ll also see files you deleted a while back, since it picks up ALL data from unallocated space.
If you need help with the scan steps, just shout.

lastKnownGood

SocialImpactCoder I’m 1000% sure I didn’t delete any partitions. Wouldn’t even know how to do that if I tried 😅
I literally just plugged it in like I always do. Could that really happen just from a random power flicker?

HopeInSleep

Sudden power loss can mess things up like that. If the drive was in the middle of writing something and power gets cut, it can corrupt the partition table and make it seem like your Western Digital external hard drive not working at all, even if it’s physically fine.
If you live in an area with frequent outages or unstable power , I’d seriously think about getting a UPS. Even a basic one will give you enough time to shut things down properly or avoid stuff like this.

EDIT: In some cases, you can use TestDisk to try and bring a lost partition table back to life. I actually managed to do that once on a drive that had gone unallocated, it vasically rebuilt the partition and everything was accessible again. But, there’s no guarantee it will find anything.

roman-demian

Nice work @lastKnownGood on posting that screenshot it really helps narrow things down fast.
Since your drive is showing up as unallocated, we actually have a pretty complete guide that walks through this exact situation. It covers how to fix it, recover your data, and lists some of the common causes.
👉Check it out here: How to Fix an Unallocated Hard Drive Without Losing Data
That should give you everything you might need to get things back on track.

lastKnownGood

roman-demian Thanks for the guide link, that looks super detailed. I’ll give it a proper read tonight. Appreciate everyone’s help so far!

lastKnownGood

Alright, Im back. I went ahead and tried Disk Drill ran a scan and I can actually see my files in the results. From what I understand, I’d need the Pro version to save everything though, right?
One thing I’m not totally clear on, the guide talks about “Create new Partition” in Disk Management. If I do that now, won’t it recover my data on it? Like, will I be able to see my files again once the partition’s is back, or is that not how it works?

HopeInSleep

lastKnownGood Creating a new partition won’t “recover” your data. All it does is set up a new (empty) file system on the drive so Windows can use it again. In the process of creating a new volume, it will format the drive, and all your existing data will be gone.
That’s why you only do it after you’ve recovered everything you need. Right now, the safest move is to pull your files off with recovery software, then worry about creating the new partition (formatting) later.

SocialImpactCoder

Not to be the “well actually” guy, but creating a new volume doesn’t instantly wipe out every last bit of your files. The existing data will usually still be sitting there until it’s overwritten. You could technically use the same recovery software to grab stuff even after setting up a new partition.
The real danger comes from how you format it. A quick format just lays down a new file system, the old data’s still ther underneath until something else writes over it. But if you uncheck “Quick Format” and go for a full format, that’s when it gets basically unrecoverable.
So safest move is still to recover first. No point adding extra steps or risking overwrites if you can avoid it.
As for Disk Drill- the free version will let you recover up to half a gig. Anything more than that and, yes, you’ll need the Pro version. You can also try completely free tools like PhotoRec or Recuva.

HopeInSleep

SocialImpactCoder Wouldn’t Recuva need a partition to even start a scan though? In OP’s case there isn’t one, so I don’t think it would work here. Far as I know, Recuva needs a readable file system to hook into, without that, it just won’t see the drive at all.
PhotoRec, on the other hand, will work just fine if you don’t care about file names and folder structure. It just recovers everything it finds into one big pile.

HopeInSleep

@SocialImpactCoder You’re right, of course, I was just trying to keep it simple

SocialImpactCoder

HopeInSleep You’re right about Recuva. forgot about that detail for a second. Just wanted to give OP a couple more options to look into.

lastKnownGood

Thanks everyone, did like you all suggested. Pulled my important files off with Disk Drill first, then created a new volume in Disk Management like the guide covered. Drive’s working fine now.
Was going to put this update in my first post, but looks like I can’t edit it anymore.
Seriously thinking about getting a UPS now… if this happened to my system drive instead of an external, I might’ve been in way bigger trouble.