[MusicallyInspired]

I've had a couple of Seagate External USB 3.0 drives set up for a long time now. One is 2TB and one is 5TB. They are full size mechanical drives not flash or SSD or anything. They each have an adapter cable for power separate from the USB3 cable. Randomly today one decided to disappear from Windows for no reason. Sometimes this has happened in the past. I'd just unplug them and plug them back in and they'd show up. Or worst case I'd have to reboot and it'd go back to normal. Today none of that worked. I've tried different USB ports and different cables and still nothing. Doesn't show up in Explorer, Disk Management, or Device Manager. It does however show up in BIOS/UEFI. It also works fine on my laptop so there's nothing wrong with the drive itself. Furthermore, the cable works fine with the other hard drive. When I plug it in I hear the Windows sound for plugging something in and Device Manager refreshes and everything but nothing new shows up. Web searches have yielded that the only best solution is to reinstall the driver from Device Manager...but it doesn't show up there so I can't. I'm thoroughly confused and frustrated as I have tons of backed up files on this thing that I just can't get at on my desktop computer anymore. It's almost a completely full drive. Any ideas?

[Balls of Steel Forever]

This is probably something you already did.

Spoiler

Start --> In search box, type cmd and press Enter.

"Command Prompt" will be opened.

Now enter the below commands

set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1 --> Press Enter

cd\ ---> Press Enter

cd windows\system32 --> Press Enter

start devmgmt.msc --> Press Enter

"Device Manager" window will be opened.

Now in the device manager, click on "View" --> Select "Show hidden devices"

Now expand all the nodes by clicking on "+" symbol. If you find any greyed

entries --> Right click on it --> Select "Uninstall".

Restart your PC --> Now try connecting your external drive

Basically change a cmd setting and it might be in view/show hidden devices in device manager. And uninstall the driver, restart, let windows do the rest.

And if it's finicky it might be an hdd issue, a recovery service would fix that, but buying a new hard drive and using your laptop to transfer would be probably cheaper, less safe, but cheaper, it's definitely strange that it's in the bios and not device manager.

Also could be an enclosure failure, the usb to sata adapter inside the case, easy to test, just lookup a teardown, and buy a sata to usb cable. It's dumb that they do that, add another point of failure for no reason. I guess to keep costs down and use the same enclosures as their ssds.

Also I was extremely tired and dumb once and didn't realize I could scroll in device manager. Like it was one of those dumb days.

[MusicallyInspired]

Yeah I tried that after posting actually but it doesn't even show up in hidden devices. It's really bizarre. Something in my OS driver files or something is messed up. I'm about to try to rewind to a system restore point and see if that does anything.

[MusicallyInspired]

Holy cow I figured it out. It actually DID show up in Device Manager but not as a disk device. As a Port (specifically COM3, what the heck??). I happened to open up Devices and Printers and it was listed as an "unspecified" device on COM3. Turns out there was a program I was using to hack my Nintendo Switch to install backed up games from my computer over USB and it required reinstalling the USB driver with a program called Zadig for the Switch as Windows recognizes it to something else. I must have accidentally done this to the hard drive driver instead at one point (it lists all USB devices not just the Switch). So for whatever reason Windows fell back onto this driver and Windows didn't know what to do with it. Anyway, deleted that driver and Windows properly recognized it with its proper driver. So crisis averted. Phew.