Hard Drive Not Showing up
Internal & external hard drive not showing up means that you can't see the drive in ANY part of your computer. That's to say, the drive is not detected nor read by the operating system in the first place. So, it won't show up in Finder, Disk Utility, desktop, or even system information (for Mac), either in File Explorer, Disk Management, or in Device Manager (for Windows).
Try those quick solutions if disk not showing up >>
Hard Drive Not Mounting
While internal & external hard drive not mounting means that the system has detected the hard drive but is unable to recognize it. The system can't access the hard drive via the mount point because of file system corruption, partition table lost, etc. From the computer side, it can recognize it's a storage device but can't access and mount it through the disk directory. From the user's view, the drive is listed somewhere on the computer, but the drive is unmounted (greyed out), or it's not recognized with the correct disk information.
Try those solutions if disk not mounting >>
Normally, you plug a USB drive like a thumb drive into the USB port on the computer, the system detects that there is a USB storage device is trying to connect. Then, after reading and recognizing the manufacturer, device type, storage capacity, partition information, and file system, the USB drive will be displayed and accessed by you.
However, sometimes, the USB drive may not show up if the recognizing process is not going well. Or, it's detected but won't work normally. Then, you can replace the USB cable, USB adapter, USB port, or read the following posts for detailed solutions.
External HDDs or external SSDs are often externally used to free up computer's space or back files up. It's a little like the USB drive if it's accessed via a USB port. For hard drive using M.2, SATA, Type-C or other port, difference could be seen on disk drivers and data transfer rate manipulated by the system. Occasionally, the external hard drive is not recognized after plugin, but you'll find the fixes in these posts to repair the external HDD or SSD that is not showing up.
The internal hard drive (often the startup disk) of your computer is important for booting up. Recognizing the internal hard drive or SSD involves BIOS or EFI checking the MBR and bootloader for startup information. Rarely can you take out and replug the internal disk when it's not recognized and not mounted. But if your computer won't turn on because the internal disk is not showing up, not mounting, or not working, read these posts and fix boot problems.
micro SD cards and standard SD cards are portable hard drives for cameras, phones, and other digital devices. Card reader is important for reading and recognizing SD cards on the computer.
Storage devices made by all manufacturers, such as WD, Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung, and SanDisk, could have troubles in working on computers. When hard drives are not showing up or recognized by your computer, you’ll know what to do with the following posts.
When your hard drive is showing up but not gets recognized, you probably have tried all solutions while the drive just won't work. Then, you can recover data from the hard drive. With iBoysoft Data Recovery, you can get files retrieved from the hard drive as long as you got a Mac or Windows PC.
1. Connect
2. Scan
3. Recovery
A computer restart will fix many disk problems in that it will clear the Random Access Memory (RAM). After the logs and temporary caches created in the working background process are cleared, your computer will get away from the last connected storage device to recognized the newly detected hard drive.
The recognized hard drive will have a mount point or a path to access it on Mac. If hard drive, external hard drive, SSD, USB drive and SD card is not showing up on Mac, check if it's listed in these place:
Windows will assign a drive letter for recognized hard drives. If the hard drive is not showing up in This PC's File Explorer, you check it in these places:
Hard drive may be showing up but it can't be recognized with correct file system, storage capacity, mount point, then the hard drive should be corrupted. You need to repair the hard drive with built-in tool on the computer.
If the built-in disk repair tool can't fix the disk problems, you need to reformat the hard drive to make it recognizable again. But before that, do hard drive data recovery because reformatting will erase and clean all your data on that hard drive.