
After clicking it, choose to install it in the folder where it is currently located on the external hard drive. When Steam doesn’t recognize the games that you’ve stored on your external hard drive and gives you an option to install them rather than play them, click the said option to install. Doing so should’ve been enough for Steam to recognize the drive and for you to get back to playing all of the different games that you want to store inside of it. On a side note, it is recommended that you restart your computer entirely as it tends to provide much better results than simply restarting the application.Īfter restarting your computer, try to play one of the games on your external hard drive through Steam.

After doing so, you need to restart Steam on your computer. One of the first solutions that you need to try as a solution for this issue is to unplug the external hard drive and then plug it back in again. How to Fix Steam Not Recognizing External Hard Drive? Here’s what to do while facing said problem. For example, there is a problem that causes Steam to not even recognize your external hard drive when it is connected. While external hard drives are great in most cases and work with just about any platform, Steam can sometimes provide a few problems with them. However, you can easily store them on your computer with the help of an external hard drive. There are many games famed for eating away storage space nowadays. Nowadays, most of the video games that you’ll find just about anywhere, including Steam, can take up many GBs of space on your device.

While there are many good reasons to install apps on a separate drive, you must consider that adding more drives also adds more points of failures to your device.Steam not recognizing external hard drive You may be able to find Registry hacks, but it's not recommended as it can cause an unknown number of errors. If you configure a secondary hard drive to install applications, that storage is pretty much tied to the device you used to install the app.įor traditional desktop applications, this will be a manual process. It should be noted that you can't just remove the drive and move it to another computer hoping that apps will run. Unlike Windows Store apps, you can't move traditional desktop (Win32) apps to another drive, but you can, alternatively, uninstall the app, and reinstall it changing the Destination Folder option during the setup.
