[Solved] Windows Explorer refuses to see USB HHD
From time to time there are reports that USB HDD is not showing up. This happened to me recently. A 4TB WD Elements USB 3 HDD was not showing up in (Windows) Explorer or in Directory Opus. There was no problem with the drive when used on other PCs.
I discovered 2 interesting things:
- If i lised USB devices by right clicking in the "remove USB devices" the drive was listed, and I could safely remove it.
- The drive was listed in Disk Management, and was assigned a drive letter.
I trided the following in an attempt to fix the problem (which internet search indicates is quite common):
- Restarting the PC did not solve the problem
- Changing the assigned drive letter did not fix the problem even after a restart - even temporarily assigning no drive letter (both with and without doing a restart) did not fix the problem.
Eventually when I was inspecting disk management and when right clicking on the one partition on the drive I noticed there was an option to "open"; selected it and up popped a directory listing for the drive. I took the opportuning to move all the files to my 6TB LaCie HDD.
I suspect there is a registry corruption problem is causing this problem. Will report further progress.
Ian


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The M drive is possible explanation. I had not considered that explanation. Cannot remember if it started out as M. But why did it continue when I changed it to O and then N?
Will do some more tinkering and report.
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Ian, not sure why it happens, but my system has stopped automatically assigning drive letters at various times over the years too. This command gets it working again:
Open an elevated command prompt and type
diskpart automount enable <enter>
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