I am having issues with my external hard drives not being seen by my PC. I just replaced the MB, but that wasn’t it. Anybody else sees this happen and have a solution? Windows 10 Creators addition.
I’ve had to leave an old external hard drive plugged in to windows 10 for almost an hour until it popped up in explorer once. maybe it’s about to die?
It’s two of the three I have. I’ll have to test it on another machine. My only other machine is a MacBook Pro, so I have to wait until the wife gets home and try it on her Dell.
it could be the USB port,turn off saving energy mode
Hi Bobby,
this is WINDOWS issue after crators update!!!
we have the same issues here, our tech guy is looking into the issue it has to do something with Samba.
the issues started after instalation of the creators update.
Apparently its not the case when you have a domain, but who would 
I will let u knwo when we get it fixed.
For now this helps:
go to explorer window and type in //YOURDISKNAME/
you shoudl succesfully get in
and make a shortcut to the desktop
the thing is, your harddrive is still there and windows can see it, it just is not presen in the explorer.
two of my three seemed to have died, but one was good. I went out and purchased a 2nd 8TB drive, which is working, too. I tested the two bad ones (seemed to be bad) on my wife’s laptop and it couldn’t see them either. I’ll try your suggestion.
i dont know if your problem is the same as i had. many years ago i decided i would archive my work, by unplugging my mirrored raid drives when they were ful, and putting new ones in. the old ones went in two locations, one next to my workstation in a cupboard, and the other to a friends house. I had a quickmount drive caddy to plug the drives into should i need to retrieve the data.
turns out that if you leave a hard drive unplugged for more than a year or so, it begins to demagnetise, and you start to get corrupted data. my earliest archives are now unreadable.
ive taken to plugging the drives in every so often, running a chkdsk, and copying important stuff over to a new drive occasionally.
i should look into online services now i have fibreoptic, but ive always been a bit skeptical about sending all my data to an unknown location.
I am using a backup, which was a life saver. I also have a few TB’s on Carbonite, which has saved me several times. I sold a house and I am temporarily living in a hotel until we close on our new house. Point is, I moved my computer and hard drives. Everything went into my car so there was no damage, but who knows, maybe even the slightest jostle can damage a drive.
hard drives are physically quite tough as long as they are not reading/writing and the heads are parked. my girlfriend was copying holiday pics onto her new laptop from a backup hard drive when it slipped off the bed.. fell 15 cm onto a thick carpet. made a noise like fingernails on a blackboard, then glass in a blender.
it “tinkled” when i shook it.
New drive same thing. Worked for a few days and now I can see it. I can see it in the Device Manager, but that’s it. Dam you Windows 10!
Hey Bobby.
Have you tried in disk management to assign a new drive letter.
I have had this a few times as well. In my case it has just been that it has no drive letter assigned.
I was just going to suggest this, has happened to me more than a few times…
if you assign a drive letter you will automatically loose UNC path setup if i am not mistaken
If your drives sow up in device manager the Windows automount feature that is responsible for automatic assignment of drive letters may be responsible for your troubles. It keeps a list of known drives and the drive letters it has assigned previously to them. Maybe that list got confused on your system and prevents the automatic assignment. Have a look at this article - it mentions the windows services involved. Especially the last part about clearing the mentioned list could be of interest.
Daniel
Mine ended up being a driver issue, however, it seems that I have to keep installing it. It is working now but might break again when I reboot. I’ll have to wait and see. For now, it is working.
if you have to install it again try right clicking the install file and install as administrator, then after its complete reboot the computer before doing anything else and see if that helps. Do you get any errors when you reboot? like it saying there is a program running but there is nothing in the list?