Different Ways to Fix Seagate Hard Drive Not Showing Up

A common problem with Seagate drives is when your PC isn’t recognizing or detecting the drive even after being plugged in. Seagate hard drive not showing up can be a major inconvenience at times.

This is especially true if you’ve got something to do with your hard drive. But how exactly does the Seagate hard drive come undetected?

Although there is no clear reason as to why this happens, you can at least deduce how to fix the problem, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do today. This article offers a few ways to fix Seagate hard drive not showing up, as well as the underlying cause of the problem.

What Is A Seagate Hard Drive?Five Things to Try Before Fixing The IssueSix Solutions on WindowsTwo Main Solutions on MacRecover Data on Formatted Seagate Hard DriveConclusion

What Is A Seagate Hard Drive?

The first thing you have to know about is what a Seagate hard drive is. Seagate is a brand of a storage device that is fairly popular and has a good reputation among desktop users. It is used to store data and fulfill tasks such as creating a backup, cloning files, and more.

The Seagate Hard Drive is often found on the File Explorer in Windows or Finder on Mac. However, this is not always the case, because it can sometimes not show up in these places. This just shows that you’ve encountered the Seagate hard drive not showing up problem.

So what happened for you to encounter this problem. Generally, there are four main reasons for this occurrence:

1. USB port malfunction. The simplest cause is when the USB port is not working properly. This is often encountered when your computer is relatively old or it was damaged in the past without you being aware.
2. Outdated Drivers. Just like with other software, if it is not up-to-date, it won’t be compatible and sufficient to run various tasks.
3. Virus/Corruption. When software is attacked by a virus, it can become corrupted and experience all kinds of issues.
4. Hard Drive Failure. More often than not, the hard drive fails to operate properly and as a result, it won’t display you any external drives that you plug into the port.

Although these are the four reasons for Seagate's hard drive not showing up, there are many more causes to the problem. With that said, you should at least try out a few things first before actually attempting to fix the problem you are facing now.

Five Things to Try Before Fixing The Issue

Resolving your issue with the Seagate hard drive would require a considerable amount of knowledge about the underlying problem. However, for beginner’s sake, we’re going to try out simple solutions first.

Here are some things you might want to try out quick:

1. Unplug the Seagate hard drive and plug it in again at the same USB port.
2. Plug your Seagate hard drive to a different USB port.
3. Try to connect the hard drive to another PC.
4. Use anti-virus software to scan your computer.
5. Check out any physical damage on your PC.

With this, you’ll be able to solve minor problems, hopefully including the Seagate hard drive not showing up issue. Now if this doesn’t work, then it might be time to actually go to the real deal, starting from the solutions on Windows.

Six Solutions on Windows

There are many cases of Seagate hard drive not showing up on Windows. This includes being shown in Disk Management and not on My Computer, being shown on BIOS and not on Disk Management, and many more. In fact, the solution depends on the situation. With that said, let’s start with the most common solution for Windows users.

1. Assign Drive Letter

It’s common knowledge that when a drive partition doesn’t have a drive letter, it would not be accessible on your My Computer or This PC. That is why your first task is to assign a letter for the drive partition of the Seagate hard drive.

There are many ways to do this. To begin with, here are the steps to assign a letter using the Command Prompt:

1. Go to the Start Menu of your computer.
2. Type in “cmd” in the search bar.
3. Right-click on the first option that shows up then select Run as administrator.
4. On the Command Prompt, type in “Diskpart” to signal the start of the operation.
5. Enter “list volume” to get a list of volumes on your PC.
6. Type “select volume #”, replacing # with the number of the volume of your Seagate hard drive.
7. Type “assign letter=#”, replacing # with the letter you want to assign the hard drive.

At this point, your Seagate hard drive would already have a drive letter assigned. Now all you have to do is try to open your My Computer or This PC again.

You may also use third-party software to assign, remove, or even change drive letters, but we will leave it at that. You should prioritize learning as many solutions as possible for Seagate hard drive not showing up, which leads us to our next option.

2. Fix Master Boot Record (MBR)

Another case of Seagate hard drive not showing up on your File Explorer is due to damaged Master Boot Record. So to fix the problem, you should try fixing the damage on your MBR. There are basically two ways to do this. You can either use a command prompt or third-party software.

However, we’re only going to how to do it with the command prompt, and here’s how you can do this:

1. Launch the Command Prompt as an administrator with the steps we used earlier.
2. Type “Exe” to display the different options that you may use with the tool.
3. This includes RebuildBcd, ScanOs, FixBoot, and most importantly, FixMbr.
4. Execute the /FixMbr command on the CMD.
5. This will automatically repair the Master Boot Record.
6. Wait for the process to complete.
7. After this, you’ll be able to fix any problem that the damaged MBR might have caused.

3. Initialize Disk

In some cases, Seagate hard drive not showing up is caused when the initialization of your drive didn’t turn out fine. Thus, to fix any problems caused by a bad initialization, you should try to initialize the drive again, and here’s how you can do this:

1. Launch the command prompt the way you did before.
2. Type in “Diskpart” to enter the appropriate mode.
3. Type “list disk” and press enter to view the available disks on your PC.
4. Type “select disk #” with # as the number of the disk that you want to initialize.
5. Lastly, type “convert MBR/GPT”.

With this, the Seagate hard drive will be initialized yet again, and hopefully, the problems concerning the bad initialization will be fixed.

4. Turn off Fast Startup

We’ve all encountered a problem that was caused by an improper configuration on our device. Most of the time, a feature that was supposed to help you is giving you trouble instead. This is likely the case for Seagate hard drive not showing up. The Fast Startup option was made so that your PC would startup as quickly as possible.

But this can sometimes lead to several components not being able to load properly, and that’s why you have to disable to try Fast Startup by following these steps carefully:

1. Go to the Start menu on your PC.
2. Type in “Control Panel” on the search bar and select the first option from the results.
3. Go to the Hardware and Sound
4. Click on Power Options.
5. On the left side of the window, click on Choose what the power button does.
6. Click on Change settings that are currently unavailable.
7. Under Shutdown settings, uncheck the box for Turn on fast startup (recommended).
8. Click on Save changes.

At this point, your PC would not rush the startup process of the computer. However, sometimes the option won’t show up on Windows, so it would be better to use other solutions.

5. Update Device Driver

As previously said, one of the main reasons for the existence of the Seagate hard drive not showing up issue is an outdated driver. For that reason, we’re going to learn how to update your device driver. Here are the steps you need to follow to accomplish this:

1. Press Win key + R on your keyboard to go to the Run command.
2. On the search bar, type in “MSC” then press Enter to go to the Device Manager window.
3. Expand the Universal Serial Bus controllers
4. Right-click on one option then click on Update Driver Software…
5. Do this for all the options under the Universal Serial Bus controllers

You might have to wait for some time to finish all this, but you can be assured that it has a high chance of solving the Seagate hard drive not showing up issue.

6. Format Seagate Hard Drive

Our last option for solving the problem on windows is formatting the hard drive. We made this our last resort since it might lead to data loss, although we can recover data easily, we’re going to discuss that later on.

Either way, here are the steps on how to format you Seagate hard drive:

1. Right-click on This PC or My Computer.
2. Select Manage.
3. On the right side of the window, click on Disk Management.
4. You will be given a list of volumes. Right-click the volume representing the Seagate hard drive, then click on Format…
5. In the next window, you will be able to configure the formatting process such as the drive letter, the type of file system, and more.
6. Once you’ve finished configuring the settings, click on OK.
7. Wait for the formatting process to complete. Meanwhile, you shouldn’t use the drive.

Once you do this, you can expect some files to be missing from the hard drive. In fact, the Seagate hard drive might even be wiped out. Regardless, you can recover data using our guide in later sections, but first, let’s discuss how you’re going to solve the problem on Mac.

Two Main Solutions on Mac

The Seagate hard drive not showing up issue is a bit different on Mac. Either way, you can still try out a couple of things to fix the problem.

1. Mount An External Disk

Your first option is to mount or attach the external disk to the operating system. This is because the automatic mounting doesn’t always work, so you’ll have to do it yourself, and here’s how:

1. Plugin the Seagate hard drive on your Mac.
2. Open the Utilities and Disk Utility window of your Mac.
3. Right-click on the volume representing the Seagate hard drive then select Mount.

With that, the hard drive should start to show itself on your Mac.

2. Use First Aid on Seagate Hard Drive

Your second option is to use First Aid, a feature on Mac that allows you to fix any issues on your device, including problems on hard drives. Here are the steps on how to access the First Aid:

1. Go to the Utilities and Disk Utility.
2. Right-click on the volume of your Seagate hard drive.
3. Select First Aid.
4. Click on Run to start the process.

With First Aid running, any issues, especially the minor ones, will be solved. Now, what if you had no choice but to format your Seagate hard drive. Fortunately, we have the solution for that.

Recover Data on Formatted Seagate Hard Drive

Most of the time, among the solutions we handed out today, you’ll end up forced to format your hard drive. Considering that this is your last resort, it should fix the problem. But what about the data loss problem. How are you going to fix that?

An Overview of FoneDog Data Recovery

FoneDog Data Recovery is a specialized tool that was made to recover all kinds of files from different causes. As luck would have it, one such cause that the tool can fix is data loss from partition formatting.

Additionally, the tool supports both Windows and Mac, so you don’t have to worry about compatibility or accessibility. So how can you use this software?

Free DownloadFree Download

FoneDog Data Recovery User Guide

Again, you’re very lucky since FoneDog Data Recovery doesn’t have a complex way of operating. You just have to follow these steps and you can be on your way:

1. Launch the FoneDog Data Recovery tool on your PC.
2. Select the Data Type that you want to recover. You can also check the box for Check all file types to include all file types.
3. Choose which drive you want to recover. You can choose from Hard Disk Drives or Removable Drives, but in our case now, you should just choose the Seagate hard drive.
4. Click on Scan.
5. Wait for the scanning process to finish.
6. You will be given a selection of items. Select the files that you want to recover.
7. Once you’re done with the selection, click on the Recover
8. Wait for the recovery process to finish.

At this point, you would’ve already solved the Seagate hard drive not showing up problem in addition to the data loss issue.

Conclusion

Assuming that you use your Seagate hard drive a lot, then Seagate hard drives not showing up should be major inconvenience to you. Considering the complexity of the problem, not just anyone can solve it.

Fortunately for you, we’ve discussed several solutions on how to fix it, both on a Windows and Mac OS. Even with all that, you should still remember that you have to do is maintain the health of your Seagate hard drive to avoid facing such issues often.