Why Isn'T My Passport Showing Up Portable May Require
Why Isn'T My Passport Showing Up Code You Can

If youre lucky, one of these simple steps should get your new drive up and running.

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External drives are simple: you plug them in, they appear on your computer, and you can drag files right on over.

But if your drive isnt appearing when you plug it in, you might have a problem.

Here are a few troubleshooting steps you can take to remedy the situation.

Why Isn'T My Passport Showing Up Portable May Require

While some drives can draw enough power from your computers USB port, othersespecially larger drives not intended to be portable may require wall power to spin up.

If your drive came with an AC power adapter but you havent plugged it in, try hooking it up (and pressing the power button, if there is one).

If it came with two USB plugs, make sure theyre both plugged into your PC.

With any luck, your drive will appear normally once it gets the juice it needs.

Its possible the port in question is failing, or just being finicky with your specific drive.

If its plugged into a USB 3.0 port, try a USB 2.0 port.

If its plugged into a USB hub, try plugging it directly into the PC instead.

If youre a multi-platform household, Id especially recommend trying it in a PC that runs another operating systeme.g., if you cant get the drive showing up on a Windows PC, try plugging it into a Mac.

Its possible the drive just isnt formatted for the computer youre trying to use, and youll need to copy that data onto a drive thats formatted for cross-compatibility.

Expand the Disk Drives menu and the Universal Serial Bus menu to see if your external drive appears in either set.

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If you see an entry that looks like your drive with a yellow exclamation mark, right-click on the device and choose Propertiesyou may find an error code you can Google.

You can also head to the Driver tab and try updating or uninstalling the driver and rebooting your computer.

Usually, hard drives just use Windows built-in USB and hard disk drivers, so this isnt likely to fix a temperamental drive, but its worth a shot.

You can also try downloading drivers from the drive manufacturers website, but again, thats probably a long shot.) Check out our guide to updating your drivers for more details on this process.

Open the Start menu and type disk management, and press Enter when the Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions option appears.

Once Disk Management loads, scroll down to see if your disk appears in the list.

If its offline, right-click the disks name (e.g.

If the disk hasnt been formatted (itll say Unallocated under a black bar), right-click it and choose New Simple Volume.

This will also solve the problem if the drive is formatted for another operating system, as described above.

Be warned that formatting it will erase any data on the drive, so only continue if youre sure you dont need anything from it.

Finally, if your drive is online and formatted, but doesnt show a drive letter next to its name, right-click the volume and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths to add a drive letter.

Why Isn'T My Passport For Mac Showing Up