Issues viewing an external hard drive on Acer aspire 3 however how I can add/remove file?

Hey!

I have a question hoping someone can answer or provide some insight. My wife and I recently bought an Acer laptop and it's been perfect for what we need. However, we have an external hard drive that we want to start using and storing some pictures and other files on it. The hard drive has plenty of pictures on it already.

For some reason, when I plug the hard drive into the USB port, I am not able to open the hard drive, view what is on it or add or remove files to it. It pops up in Device Manager and it's definitely connected, however I'm lost as to how I can add/remove files.

Acer Laptop: Acer - Aspire 3 - 17.3" HD+ Laptop - 11th Gen Intel Core i3-1115G4 - 8 GB Memory - 256GB SSD - Pure Silver

External hard drive: Seagate Expansion SCSI Disk Device, 1 TB.

Any help is appreciated. Thank you!

[Edited the thread to add the issue detail]

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AnhEZ28

@salvo629 try to plug it into another USB port, or go to the disk manager and check if the drive is present there. Likely that it isn't assigned the drive letter.

salvo629

@AnhEZ28 The device is showing up in disk manager as “Unkown" and “Not Initialized” and in the body it indicates “Unallocated” under the total GBs.

Puraw

Hi @salvo629

Is the external drive a SSD or a mechanical (spinner) HDD?

The reason I ask is that Yourpath (post below) has a SSD that he cannot acces in Windows, the SSD failed and you may have the same problem. Try to plug the external HDD in a USB port of another PC to see if the drive is OK.

https://community.acer.com/en/discussion/681180/aspire-e-15-laptop-stuck-on-acer-black-screen-with-preparing-automatic-repair-help

AnhEZ28

@salvo629 that's quite concerning since you already stored some pictures on that drive. Did you contact Seagate for data recovery support?

salvo629

@Puraw I have tried the device in multiple computers. A Mac, a Dell, etc.

@AnhEZ28 I'm pretty sure there are pictures on there, if there are they would be from over 7 years ago. I have not reached out to Seagate. I will try to do that next.

I will take a look at the issue again tonight.

Ant22hony

Hello, I am also having a similar problem and have run into this multiple times at this point with no fix. When I connect various devices they show show up in disk/device management, but not elsewhere when it comes time to open the device. I am currently working with an external hard drive that shows up in disc management but not under "this pc" when I go to transfer files. I have installed and reinstalled all the drivers I can find and have still not found a fix.