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[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:

  1. If i lised USB devices by right clicking in the "remove USB devices" the drive was listed, and I could safely remove it.
  2. 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):

  1. Restarting the PC did not solve the problem
  2. 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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Ian, the times when I have seen this type of behaviour for my USB external drives, the cause has been either of the following:

Windows Disk Management didn't allocate any drive letter to the external drive.

or

It allocated drive M: which is used by Acronis Drive and therefore doesn't show in Explorer.  This is one of my pet gripes against how Acronis Drive works and it's use of drive M: by default with no option to change this!  I have to go into Disk Management and allocate a different drive letter!

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.

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>