It's seen as a "USB Mass Storage Device". No Drive Letter.

Edited by wingco1 (Mon 23-Mar-15 12:27:33)

It shows up in Device Manager disk drives. Although it takes longer to appear than other USB drives I connect.

OK. The MBR is probably corrupt. Now, how to fix it? Don't format it if you want to retrieve your data.

Easeus Data Recovery will probably do the job. The trouble is, I've forgotten how to use it. My memory is shot to bits these days. You need to ask it to recover the drive partitions. The file systems inside the lost partitions are probably OK. It's a common scenario.

Thanks for all your help Mick. I'm not wanting to recover the data it's stored elsewhere. But I can't remember how to format the disk either. Bearing in mind the computer doesn't see it.

You'll need to create a new partition. That should fix the MBR (if it's corrupt). Then, you format the partition. It can all be done using the Disk Management utility.

Disk Management doesn't see the usb drive.

I assume the drive is in a USB caddy and out of warranty? Try removing it from the caddy and connect directly to a Sata port on the motherboard and see if it's recognised correctly. If you do damage the caddy in doing so (should be easy with a bit of care) its not a big deal as you can get replacement USB 3.0 caddy pretty cheap if the drive is OK. Could be the pcb in the caddy that is faulty.

It's possible that the USB controller is fried. I'd still try one of the free disk utilities first, EaseUs or Paragon come to mind.

Have you checked the PSU? It's just possible that the USB interface is drawing power from the USB hub but the HDD itself has no power. Do any lights come on on the case? Does the drive spin up?

Edited by micksharpe (Mon 23-Mar-15 14:24:32)