How to Recover Hidden Files from External Hard Drive? Complete Guide

  

Published By Mohit Jha

Approved By Nimisha Ramesh

Published On November 25th, 2024

Reading Time 6 Minutes Reading

Overview: As we are all aware of gadgets like pen drives, SD cards, external hard drives, etc. To keep our sensitive data safe, we create multiple backups using this. Sometimes, your data is not missing and gets hidden on an external hard drive. Trying it and being unable to recover hidden files from external hard drive may make you anxious. In this article, we are going to discuss all the scenarios that will give you a possible way to find a hidden folder on an external hard disk without any data loss.

User Query:

“A few days ago, a very odd thing happened to me. When I used my external hard drive in my system, I was unable to find my files as they were gone, but when I checked my drive space, it was taking some amount of memory. I realized my data had been damaged or hidden. Can anyone help me with this issue?'”

The above situation shows the user is facing the hidden file problem; it is not a big issue, so don’t worry about it. This issue is due to a virus-infected hard drive or missing operations in settings. Here, we are going to discuss a few operations to show hidden files on an external hard drive in Windows 10, 8, 7, and 11.

Reasons to Recover Missing Files in External Hard Disk

There are a lot of reasons behind hidden files; a few of them are listed below:

• When your files get corrupt or damaged.
• When your system is unprotected and a virus attacks,.
• When a user hides their data manually and forgets.
• Due to system miss operation.

There are many other reasons why your file gets damaged or hidden. The good thing is that you have the below solution to show or retrieve hidden data from an external hard disk.

How to Recover Hidden Files from External Hard Drive?

External hard drive not working? How to fix external hard drive not detected issue? Here you will get 4 solutions related to external hard drive file recovery. Read and follow the steps carefully; you will be able to recover all files by yourself.

#1: Unhide Hidden Files in External Hard Drive Manually

Using CMD, you can find hidden folders on an external hard disk without any data loss.
A step-by-step process is shown below:

• Click on the Window Start button from your taskbar and type “CMD” in it.
• Press Enter.
• Otherwise, press the Windows icon + R from your keyboard, and the Run window pops up.
• Type “cmd” and press the enter button. Your cmd screen will open.
• Type: “attrib -s -h -r c:/*.* /s/d.” (C: is a drive; type your own drive letter.)

• Now, press enter to execute the command.

This command will take time to execute. Wait for a while and close the cmd. Now, open the external hard drive and see that all hidden files have been restored again.

#2: Show Hidden Files on External Hard Drive with Windows Explorer

We have already discussed how a virus-infected hard drive may hide your file or have a tendency to lose data. To recover hidden files, users need to install anti-virus software on their system. A command prompt is used in this case to show the data. If you don’t have any trusted anti-virus software, buy them and then follow the steps to show hidden files on an external hard drive in Windows 10.

Install the anti-virus software and then scan your entire system, including the external hard drive.

1. Click the Start button, search for Control Panel, and open it.
2. Click File Explorer Options.
3. Next, click on the View tab and click on Hidden files and folders.
4. Select the Show hidden files, folders, and drives option and uncheck Hide protected operating system files.

• Finally, click “Apply” and “OK.”.
• Open File Explorer, navigate to your external hard drive, and check if the files are visible.

Attention! Though there is a manual solution we described, there is a chance that users will face problems in some files. Files with a heavy resolution or large size are difficult to recover manually. There, you need to use software that retrieves files without any data loss.

Method 3: Using CHKDSK to Fix External Hard Disk File System Errors

If the attrib command isn’t working, you can take the corrupted file system into consideration.

1. 1. To examine the file system, you can run CHKDSK.
   2. Open File Explorer > Right-click your external hard drive > Tap Properties > Tools > Check.

1. Download the Hard Drive Data Recovery Tool.
2. After that, scan the hard disk partition.
3. Next, preview all hard drive data files.
4. Save your hard drive deleted data files

Conclusion

We have assumed that recovering hidden files from external hard drive is the most uncommon question That is why I chose this topic and tried to give you all possible solution regarding this problem. I hope this may probably show hidden files on external hard drive in Windows 10. If you find any difficulty in this, then do not hesitate to use software. This is an effective and valuable tool for you.

Frequently Asked Questions