How do I get my external hard drive to work again?

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How do I get my external hard drive to work again?

Here are a few troubleshooting steps you can take to remedy the situation.

  1. Make Sure It’s Plugged In and Powered On. Western Digital My Book.
  2. Try Another USB Port (or Another PC)
  3. Update Your Drivers.
  4. Enable and Format the Drive in Disk Management.
  5. Clean the Disk and Start From Scratch.
  6. Remove and Test the Bare Drive.

Why do external hard drives stop working?

Firstly, quite often an external hard drive may be damaged by a virus or other kind of malicious program that you installed completely by accident. Secondly, an external hard drive can simply have mechanical damage to the components. Third, bad sectors can cause a disk to fail.

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How do I stop my external hard drive from turning off?

Locate the “USB settings” section and then expand that section. Disable the “USB selective suspend setting” to set it to “Disabled” instead of the default which is “Enabled”. Now locate the “Hard disk” section and disable the “Turn off hard disk after” setting so that it is set to “0” which is disabled.

What happens when hard disk turns off?

The option called Turn off hard disk after is a part of power management options of the current power plan. The hard drive engine will be stopped and its disks will not spin. Next time your software access the drive, it will take a few seconds before the drive start spinning and give access to files.

How do I keep my hard drive running?

To stop or prevent the Hard Disk from going to sleep, click on the Battery / Power icon in the taskbar, and select More Power options. In the Control Panel windows which opens, select Change Plan settings for your current Power Plan.

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How to fix external hard drive not working in Windows 10?

Use delete function from Device Manager to solve the not working error. So, right-click on Start and select Device Manager. Now click on Disk Drivers and find among the devices your external hard drive. Click on Delete -> Ok. After the process is complete, disconnect the external hard drive and restart the computer.

What to do if your external hard drive is not responding?

Mostly, when an internal or external hard drive contains an unknown error or corrupted file system, the Windows computer will not be able to detect or open the drive. Here you have two options to check up the disk and fix internal errors on a not responding external hard drive:

How to manually check and fix external hard drive errors?

Run CMD to manually check and fix external hard drive errors 1 Open Command Prompt and type: chkdsk /f g: (replace g with the drive letter of your external hard drive). Click to copy chkdsk /f g: 2 Hit Enter to let the checking process to run; 3 When it’s finished, type: exit and hit Enter to finish the process.

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How to repair an unrecognizable external hard drive?

If it doesn’t work after changing the USB port or cannot be read by a new PC, try the quick fix below to repair an unrecognizable external hard drive: Step 1. In Run (Windows + R), type devmgmt.msc and hit Enter. Step 2. Open Device Manager > expand “Universal Serial Bus controllers”.