Manual Trick to Recover Data from Unrecognized External Drive

External hard disks are now available with extended limits to store TBs of data without any hassle. They can be used for storing backups as well. They often serve for the purpose of data recovery whenever the system’s main disk goes inaccessible.

The situation becomes troublesome when the system can’t recognize or detect the external hard disk and throws up an error saying “The drive cannot be accessed”, “the drive is not formatted”, “RAW drive is not initialized” and much more. This indicates corruption or fault in the drive that occurs due to improper usage or simply due some external issues.

So, what about your critical data? Are you willing to bear this loss and move on with your business?

Obviously not, right?

Here’s a reliable manual method that can help you deal with the inaccessibility of external disk and save your critical data:

Firstly, confirm the inaccessibility issue of your disk by testing it with some other system. This will help to ensure whether the problem is with USB drive or your system’s port itself. if it is still unrecognized, then plug the USB drive back to your system’s port and perform the following steps:

1. Go to the Start menu.
2. Click on “My Computer/This PC”. A new window will open up displaying the list of drives existing or connected to your system.
   [ you can note the letters assigned to each drive, for example – C, D, E, etc.]
3. Browse to the Map Network Drive tab available on the top left side of the window. Click Continue when the second window prompts for your permission to access new menu.
4. On the top of new windows that will open up, click the Drive button. Select a drive that’s currently not in use like ‘I’ or ‘H’ and hit the Browse button to specify the drive that your system is not recognizing. After drive selection, click OK.
5. Then, close the window by clicking on Finish button.
6. Finally, restart your system and open “My Computer/This PC” and check whether the external drive is accessible.

This method will certainly help you to deal with the USB inaccessibility, but if you face loss of data too, it would be better to switch to a third party data recovery solution.

If you want to invest in a professional tool, Kernel for Windows Data Recovery is a good. It is encoded with powerful algorithms for the recovery of both lost and deleted files with utmost accuracy.

The Bottom Line

You can easily recover data from the external drive that has gone unrecognized or undetectable in your system through manual methods. However, sometimes you may fail to retrieve the data too. Using a proficient third party tool like Kernel for Windows Data Recovery will prove to be a sensible choice to get your data back in its original form.