External Hard Drive Not Found

[Chris kershaw]

I have windows 10 on an acer laptop and I can connect either of my 2 external hard drives the light on them turns on & you can hear/feel them spinning up, usb flash drive work fine so the USB ports are working the eternal hard drives work fine on another windows 7 laptop. They dont show up at all in disk management, Ive tried uninstalling the hidden drives under the USB controllers in the device manger but nothings working is this a windows 10 fault??? any advise would be very welcome

 

[T_J]

I have Windows 10 on a 2011 Dell Inspiron 660 desktop (i3). After upgrading from W7 to W10 in February, both of my WD external drives worked perfect from day 1, with ZERO input from myself.
WD 500 GB My Passport and WD 1 TB My Passport Ultra.
I connected both WD USB drives about 3 minutes ago. So currently I have 3 hard drives running perfectly, the PC hard drive and the two USB hard drives (I opened some files on both USB drives).

 

[Trouble]

Hello Chris and welcome to the forum.
It's possible that you may need to go to the manufacturer's support website
https://acer--uk.custhelp.com/
And drill through to your specific laptop model name and number and determine what they may have in the way of drivers that might support Windows 10 for your laptop.
Paying particular attention to anything regarding BIOS, Chipset and anything specific with respect to USB
It is not unusual, following an upgrade, that you may need to upgrade or even reinstall some hardware drivers.
The windows 10 upgrade may have substituted some generic drivers to facilitate the upgrade that are less than optimal.
Sometimes, even if you need to resort to a Windows 8 driver, it may help.

 

[Chris kershaw]

Thanks for your reply ill have a look. the laptop cam with windows 10 on it, its so annoying, ive taken the HDD to friends laptops today & works on windows 7 & 8 just not 10 It work 2 weeks ago!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Norton]

I have 3 WD USB external drives, 2 are relatively old, and 1 new 2TB Caviar Blue. All work perfectly with Win 7 or 10.
No user intervention required before or after the Win 10 upgrade. They also run well on my Dell desktop, laptop and my daughters Acer desktop and laptop.
I doubt that its a driver or HD issue. It's possible you have a USB power supply problem. You mentioned that flash drives operate OK. However, flash drives are 100% solid state, as such, they have much less demand on the USB power supply.
Spinners have a much higher load demand than flash drives.

 

[Norton]

Just a thought! if you go into the control panel "Devices and Printers" your USB device should show in the connected devices. If not it may be a driver problem.