External drives or USB flash drives are usually used to store data and it is also used to portability. When you plug USB or External drives sometimes it wont recognized in windows. When you got struck in some kind of this problem, then try to do the follow the available options. External drive maybe not recognized by any of the following factors. Your drive doesn't contain any partitions or driver may be dead or USB ports maybe dead or the external drive itself maybe dead.

Disk Management

When you plug your external drive and it is not recognized by the windows then you check whether your drive is listed in the disk management or not. You can check in the disk management by following the below steps

* In Run Command type "diskmgmt.msc" in it, without any quotes

* It will open the disk management

* In the disk management check whether your device is listed or not

* If your drive is listed then you can check whether there is any partition is there

* If any partition is available then you can format the drive to windows format and it will work

* If there is no partition in the disk you need to create a partition usable by the windows

If your drive is listed in the disk management then you can skip the below steps and you can jump how to format the disk.

How to Make Windows Recognize Drive ?

If the windows doesn't recognize the drive then you try connecting it on the other USB port available. If that detects the then your USB port is dead. If none of your ports on the system detects the external drive then connect the external or USB port to other system. If you dint have any option to connect to other computer, then let we conclude it will be due to driver issues in the system.

* In run command type "devmgmt.msc”

* It will open device manager

* In the disk drivers check there is any yellow exclamation near the device driver

* If so then right click on it and check properties

* In drivers tab, check for the latest update for the driver

* If you recently updated your driver and after that your driver dint work then rollback driver update

Formatting External Drive

* If your drive is listed in the disk management then right click on the unallocated space

* Select New simple volume and assign a drive letter to it

*  It will automatically format the drive and it will be showed in the list

* If your external drive does not show up in the devices such as DVD, Smart TV then format your drive to old FAT 32 file format

If you already had some data in that drive then its prefered to take backup in the system you used. If you format your drive in operating system such as linux and mac it wont show up in windows as the system file format are different. When you format the drive you will loss all the data you had in that drive. 

In our laptop hard disk memory space and not adequate for many user who stores large amount of movies, songs and games. So we usually buy external hard disk of sizes vary from 1TB to few TB. We may come across this question can i create partition on my external hard disk ? Here is the answer for your question. 

You can create any number of partition on your hard disk. If you prefer to use different drives to store your songs, movies and games and you can create. You is advised not create any logical drive on your external hard disk it may create problems sometimes corrupt your data or you cant able to access some parts of the drive permanently.

Hope this information might be useful for you, Happy Computing !

Many of us find the hard disk memory of your laptop was inadequate and wanna buy a external hard disk. But you may got a question what are the factors to be noted while buying a external hard disk ? Here i list the few important factors need to considered while buying a new external hard disk.

* Performance Speed
* Brand
* Type (SSD/HSD)
* Security and Encryption Feature
* Warranty 
* Password Protection Feature
* Plug and Play support
* Cost 

If you go for more features and its will cost be more. Always cost and features are inversely proportional to it. Hope this information might be useful for you, Happy Computing !