PC wont read Toshiba External Harddrive

[AlwaysWinter]

I've had this usse for a long time. I bought a brand new Toshiba external harddrive about 3 years ago when I purchased my expensive lemon Lenovo laptop (the piece of junk died on me). When I installed the external to my laptop, I set a password on it. The external is still very brand new. I've barely used it. But the thing is that whenever I go to plug in my mom's laptop, my brother's laptop, or in my pc, it doesn't pick it up AT ALL.  The external isn't broken. It lights up blue and it vibrates inside. The only pc where it worked was in my now broken laptop.

What can I do for my HP can pick it up?

[Photoray002]

Hello @AlwaysWinter 

On your screen shot, Disk 2 is showing Not Initialized with unallocated space. I assume this is your 1 TB Toshiba?

All I can do is guess and offer a suggestion.

If so... there are many reasons a drive is not being recognized properly. Partition loss, bad sectors, file system corruption, virus and so forth. Although in your case I highly doubt its a driver issue.

Was the Toshiba connected to the Lenovo laptop when the laptop crashed? This might have corrupted the drive. Also in rare occasion, if you pull the USB cord without properly ejecting the drive from the taskbar, you could also corrupt the drive if files are being written at the same time its disconnected.

You will need to initialize the drive and give it a drive letter and format. If you had data on it previously, you might be able to recover some or most of it with recovery software afterward. There are free and paid versions out there. Piriform's Recuva is one free alternative that works pretty good.

Easus has a paid version that claims to be able to recover data before reallocating (I have not used it).

Here are some examples...

https://www.easeus.com/storage-media-recovery/external-hard-drive-not-initialized.html

https://www.partitionwizard.com/partitionmagic/disk-unknown-not-initialized.html

I would suggest you take a read through them before you do anything.

[AlwaysWinter]

Thanks for writing. I spent about 5 hours trying to figure it out and this is what I learned:

I attempted to use command promnt to wipe it but couldn't access it, even as the administrator, cus I'm assuming it has to do with the fact that my external is password locked. Then, I went to disk management but the format option wasn't available (it won't let me do it). Then I went to control panel and went to devices, and that was a failure. I also tried to format using a different command key in cmd but the promnt won't read the external. So, I couldn't format it thru cmd or dsk mgmt. I couldn't even assign it a drive letter.

For the past 2 hours, I've been repairing it with EaseUs. I'll keep you updated.