Not able to access or read your external portable hard disk in Windows? Try Linux
Reads portable hard disks easily that Windows will just not read or access
I have a Maxtor external portable hard disk that has some movies, music and old data that I have had for a decade or so. Of late whenever I tried to hook it up to my desktop running Windows 10 or my laptop that runs Windows 11 the disk would respond very slowly and now recently not being detected at all. Worst case scenario I am able to see a drive letter but not the contents of the disk and Windows prompts me to format the disk in order to use it. In fact I was considering looking for a Data Recovery Serivce that could retrieve data from the disk. I then realized I have another desktop running Kali Linux. I connect the hard disk to the system and to my total surprise it reads the Maxtor without any hassles. It was just unbelievable like plug and play.
I have mentioned in some earlier posts that it always pays to have a second system in case your laptop or desktop fails and it certainly pays if this backup or standby system is running linux. I also highly recommend the Manjaro Linux XFCE distro as I have used that in the past too with great success. With both these distros things just work out of the box with hardly any tweaking. I won’t say the same of Ubuntu Linux as I wasn’t happy with that distro.
So next time you have a portable hard disk that wouldn’t be recognized or read by Windows, try Linux.
