Solved: Hard Drive Not Showing Files Though They Still Exist

Files Not Showing in External Hard Drive Though They Still Exist

"Why can't I see files and folders saved to my external HDD in Windows 10? They should be there, because I didn't press deletion button or format the disk. So annoying. Where have they gone? How to make them show up again?"

Quite a lot of Windows users had this issue that their external HDD, USB flash drive, Pendrive or memory card is showing up in Windows Explorer. However, they just can't see the files and folders there. 

Normally, by opening Windows 10 File Explorer -> clicking Viewing tab -> under where ticking the option of "Hidden items", the files and folders you can't see just now will appear again on the external drive. Unluckily, there are still some people saying that by showing hidden items doesn't help them restore the missing files.

How to Fix Files Not Showing Up on External Hard Drive?

Many factors would cause your storage drive contents disappear without your notice, such as ransomware virus hides, deletes or encrypts files, hardware issues, file system errors, hard drive gets corrupted, etc.

Therefore, salvage your precious data. To do so, download EaseUS hard drive recovery software and let the software restore files that you can't see on an external hard drive or USB drive in Windows 10 within minutes.

Step 1. Recover files not showing in external hard drive

1) Select the external HDD or USB flash drive where you can't see files & folders. Click "Scan".

2) The software will have a quick scan and deep scan at the same time. Wait until the scanning process finishes. 

3) Preview files first and then click "Recover" button to restore unseen files back.

Files not showing in internal hard drive as well as external hard drive on Mac? Use EaseUS Mac data recovery software to do recovery.

Step 2. Run Chkdsk to fix HDD, USB pen drive not showing data files

If you can't see files or folders on external hard drive or external HDD, USB pen drive not showing data files due to hard drive corruption or file system errors, use command problem to fix the hard drive problems to prevent further data loss.

1) Type cmd in the Windows search box, right click on Command Prompt program and choose Run as administrator.

2) On the command window, type chkdsk g: /f (g is the drive letter of your external hard drive, so please replace the drive letter with the corresponding drive letter of yours).

3) Press Enter and chkdsk will start checking your corrupted HDD and then fix any corruption on the drive.