[Solved] PS4 Not Recogizing/Reading External Hard Drive

"My PS4 doesn’t read my external hard drive. Is it that the PS4 cannot connect a USB storage device? How can it be? The USB external hard drive works well on my computer. I really can’t understand it."

You can see people are asking the same question for how come PS4 not recognizing USB hard drive, denied the possibility of extending the PS4 storage. It could be a great pity if you can’t solve the problem of PS4 not reading external hard drive. Do not worry! Actually, it’s very easy to solve the problem. To get it done perfectly, we should do it in 2 steps:

Step 1. Recover Files from the USB hard drive that PS4 not read without losing data

To fix the problem of PS4 not recognizing USB hard drive, we’re going to convert the USB storage device file system to PS4 friendly system. While doing it, all files on your USB external hard drive will be removed permanently. In this case, the very first you’re supposed to do is to recover files from the USB hard drive that PS4 cannot read.

Recover files from USB hard drive with cannot be read by PS4 with Data Recovery

There are some data recovery software tools you can download from the internet. However, please pick up the professional one, taking your data safety into consideration. The software here I recommend iBeesoft Data Recovery. It’s a professional yet easy-to-use tool specially designed for individuals to recover files trapped in computer hard drive as well as external hard drives. Here are some of its main features.

Download iBeesoft Data Recovery to recover files from USB hard drive now!!! Click DOWNLOAD button to download the software. After then, install it on your computer, either PC or Mac. Choose the right version according to your computer operating system.

1. Connect your USB hard drive with your computer, letting it appears on your computer as an external hard drive. Launch the best USB flash drive data recovery software.
2. In the next window, you can see all your computer hard drives as well as the connected external hard drive. Please select the USB hard drive as the target device where you’re going to recover files from and click "Scan".
3. Wait for the undelete or unformat flash drive software to finish the scanning process. After then, you can see all the found files are put into categories. Please select the file types in the left side and check out the details on the right side. When find the target files in the USB hard drive, select them and click "Recover". You can also see the "Deep Scan" option in the result window. It is a more powerful scanning mode, compared with the Quick Scan. It helps find more files in the USB hard drive. You can try it if you like.

After you recovering files from the USB hard drive, then we’re going to fix the problem of PS4 not reading external hard drive.

Step 2. Convert USB hard drive file system to PS4 friendly file system

Before getting down to the task of fixing PS4 not recognizing USB hard drive, please make sure it is not caused by the poor connection. Only ruling out the problem connection problem, then we should see it is caused by the USB file system. Generally, the file system for the USB hard drive is raw while PS4 only supports exFAT and FAT32. Her are the steps for how to change the file system of raw to exFAT or FAT32.

1. Connect the USB hard drive with your computer.
2. Right-click My Computer or This Computer and select Manage.
3. Right-click on the USB partition and select "Delete Volume…". It turns your USB hard drive to empty, showing as Unallocated.
4. Right-click on the Unallocated disk and select "New Simple Volume…".
5. Follow the built-in guide to continue. When it comes to the window shown in the picture below, select "Format this volume with…". From there, you can choose the exFAT. That’s it!!!