Recently I have purchased a brand new Hitachi 2.5 inch laptop hard disk from Amazon. I tried to connect the laptop using the external connector. The laptop detected the USB device, but it didn’t display the disk as a drive. I was worried initially thinking that the disk was faulty. Then I started troubleshooting step by step.

  • First I checked whether the USB device is getting detected properly or not. I found that it is getting detected properly.
  • Then I went to the device manager and checked the devices under hard disks. The device is showing up under the hard disk. Also I tried updating the device driver. Still It didn’t make any difference.
  • Then I uninstalled the device driver from the device manager and reconnected the hard disk again to install the driver again. But no luck. 😦
  • Next, I went to the disk management of Windows. There I saw a message that the hard disk is not initialized. Yay, I think I got the problem. 🙂 🙂
  • I have clicked on initialize the drive and then I selected the space to format the entire disk. There were two options for the partition table formats to choose at the time of initialization MBR and GPT. Mine was a 500 GB hard disk, so I have selected MBR partition table format. If your disk is larger than 2TB, you should choose GPT. I have formatted the disk with NFTS format.
  • After formatting, I have assigned a label also to the disk drive. After doing this, the disk drive is visible in the system.

It took almost 10 minutes for me to figure out these and get it working. Now the disk is working properly. I feel several others also will be facing similar issue. Hope this small write up will be helpful.

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