[Windows 11/10/7 ] Seagate External Hard Drive Not Showing Up in My Computer

Why Seagate external hard drive not showing up in My Computer?

Seagate external hard drive is a kind of popular portable storage device, which performs well and enjoys a good reputation among computer users. You can use Seagate external hard drive to back up your important data or take it as the destination disk of your internal disk during the cloning process.

In most cases, you can access the Seagate external hard drive from Windows File Explorer. However, it is possible that you encounter Seagate external hard drive not showing up in My Computer/This PC or the Windows Disk Managment does not show drives situation.

Sometimes our PC fails or makes Seagate external hard drive unrecognized even after confirming the successful connection. The problem occurs mostly due to the following causes:
▪ Outdated or corrupted device driver;
▪ Damaged/unstable-connected USB port;
▪ The Disk is not initialized;
▪ The Seagate external hard drive is physically damaged or suffered water ingress
▪ Does not have a drive letter;
▪ Incompatible file system;
▪ Corrupted MBR.

4 solutions: Fix Seagate external hard drive not showing up in My Computer

In the above section, we have listed possible reasons behind Seagate external hard drive not showing up in File Explorer. So, when Seagate external hard drive is listed in Disk Management but not in Windows 7/8/10/11 File Explorer, you can try one or more of these common solutions.

• Solution 1. Change or assign drive letter

• Solution 2. Rebuild Master Boot Record (MBR)

• Solution 3. Initialize Seagate external hard drive

• Solution 4. Format Seagate external hard drive

▶ Solution 1. Change or assign drive letter

If the Seagate external hard drive partition has no drive letter, you should assign a drive letter to it, and you can approach it from My Computer or This PC. For this task, you can open Disk Management, right-click the Seagate disk partition and choose “Change Drive Letter and Path”… Afterward, you can re-connect the disk to see whether if the Seagate drive not showing up problem has been solved.

▶ Solution 2. Rebuild Master Boot Record (MBR)

When you see the Seagate external hard drive shows as an unknown and not initialized disk in Disk Management, it might be caused by damaged MBR. You can fix the MBR and then see whether the external disk shows up properly in File Explorer.

If you want to fix the corrupted MBR, you can use CMD. Let's take the Windows 10 OS as the example. Restart the Windows and as soon as you see the Windows logo; press and hold the power button to force shutdown it. Repeat this operation 2-4 times and Windows will open up boot options for you. 

After getting into the "Advanced options" screen, click on "Command Prompt" to launch it. Then type the command bootrec.exe and "Enter" to see the options that are available for this tool. (There are four parameter available : /FixMbr, /FixBoot, /ScanOs and /RebuildBcd. Each of them can help you solve different boot problems.)

Execute /FixMbr in Windows 10 with Command Prompt. (/FixMbr allows the repair of a corrupted or damaged Master Boot Record. And you should use it when you meet one of these error messages: "Operating System not found", "Error loading operating system", "Missing operating system" or "Invalid partition table".) Now, you can see the Seagate external hard drive not showing up Windows 10 is successfully solved.

▶ Solution 3. Initialize Seagate external hard drive

If a disk has not been initialized, it will not be presented in Windows File Explorer. In such a case, right-click the hard drive, choose “Initialize Disk” and follow the appearing prompt to initialize disk. What you should pay attention to is this operation will erase all data on the Seagate external hard drive.

▶ Solution 4. Format Seagate external hard drive

If the current file system of your Seagate external hard drive is not compatible with Windows operating system such as Ext4, Ext3, or Ext2, then it won’t show up in My Computer, either. In this case, you have to format Seagate external hard drive to FAT32 or NTFS (two most commonly used file systems in Windows PC).

Of course, you can format hard drive via Disk Management or third-party software. Here I recommend you a free partition manager named AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard, which offers you various options in the file system and allows you to break the limitations that format partition larger than 32GB as FAT32. If needed, you can also use it to convert FAT32 to NTFS without losing data.

Please download this freeware to have a look how to fix Seagate external hard drive not showing up in My Computer at the detailed steps:

1. Install and run it on Windows PC.

2. Locate the hard drive partition need formatting, right-click it and choose “Format”.

3. Set the file system of the partition and you can add Partition Label if you want.

4. Confirm the operation and click “Apply” to perform it.

PS: If you are running Windows Server 2008/2012/2016/2019/2022, you can make use of AOMEI Partition Assistant Server.

Seagate external hard drive not showing up in Disk Management

Besides not showing up in My Computer, Seagate external hard drive might also be not showing up in Disk Management. Thus, When the Seagate external hard drive doesn’t present in Disk Management, you can update the driver for Seagate external hard drive.

First of all, you should press Windows + R at the same time, type “devmgmt.msc” and hit Enter to open Device Manager. Expend disk drive and locate the Seagate external hard drive. Right click it and click “Update Driver Software...” > ”Search automatically for updated driver software”. Or you can uninstall the driver and reboot your computer to reinstall the driver.

Seagate external hard drive not detected in Device Manager and BIOS

If your Seagate external hard drive is not recognized even in Device Manager or BIOS, the hard drive won’t certainly be showing up in My Computer or This PC. If you are in such case, the following solutions may do you a favor.

● Enable USB Device in BIOS

If you have disabled USB interface in BIOS, the external hard drive will not be detected. You can press a certain key (depended on your own computer manufacturer) while booting computer to enter BIOS to check whether the USB device is enabled.

● Verify Seagate external hard drive is connected properly and well

Turn off computer, disconnect Seagate external hard drive and connect it with another cable. If your Seagate external hard drive is detected, the original cable is the cause. If the problem still appears, connect the external hard drive to another USB port. Then, check whether the Seagate external hard drive is recognized. If so, it can be concluded that there is something wrong with the previous USB port.

If your computer is desktop, you should make sure that the USB port into which the Seagate external hard drive plugs is on the back of your computer.

Further reading: Recover data when Seagate external hard drive not showing up

If you do not back up beforehand but format the RAW or unallocated external hard drive to fix the Seagate external hard drive not showing up on Windows, you may get data loss as it will delete all data. On the other hand, your data will also get lost because of corruption or other reasons. Anyway, if you unfortunately encounter this, it is a good idea to rely on AOMEI Partition Assistant as well. You can use its Recover Data feature by upgrading to the Professional edition. 

Whether you meet system crashes, corruption, formatting, accidental deletion, etc., it helps you recover data from external hard drives, USB flash drives, SD cards, HDDs, SSDs, and other storage media in minutes. 

Step 1: Open AOMEI Partition Assistant Professional on your computer. Click on "Recover" and then choose "Recover Data".

Step 2: Select the Seagate external hard drive where the deleted or lost files were stored and click "Start Scan".

Step 3: After the scan is complete, preview the recovered files, and select the ones you want to restore. Click "Recover".

Step 4. Select a folder path to store the recovered items and click "Select Folder". When you see the small window below, click "OK" to finish the recovery process. Then the recovered files will be saved in the specified location.

Conclusion

All in all, it is not so tough to fix Seagate external hard drive not showing up in My Computer or This PC issue as long as you take proper action. If you tried the solutions mentioned above and the Seagate external hard drive is still not recognized or detected, the cause might be the hard drive itself. .

In such cases, you can apply professional hard drive software to diagnose your hard drive. If it dies, what you can do is to replace a new hard drive. By the way, you can recover data from external hard drive with AOMEI software.