Weird problem with external USB hard drive recognition

[trents]

My system is a Ryzen 3700x on an ASRock B550 Pro4 running Windows 11.

The problem is, any USB hard drive or USB SSD but the one I have plugged into it for backup, which is a 5TB WD Passport is not recognized by Windows File Explorer. All other USB external drives show up in Disk Manager and in Taskmanager's "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" utility but not in File Explorer. These same storage devices will show up in File Explorer on other computers I have, however, running Windows 10 or 11. And all thumb drives show up in File Manager.

Why would the 5TB USB WD backup drive show up in File Manager but others will not?

 

[trents]

Here's what I get when I try to do things like a disk check with a 2TB USB WD Passport. As you can see, the disk (Disk 1) shows up in Disk Management and is said to be healthy but File Explorer operations won't execute. It says, "Windows can't access the disk."

Post magically merged: Apr 19, 2023

I fixed it by assigning a letter to the drive. Either it had none before or it had been assigned one that conflicted with a drive letter already in use on the system: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-troubleshoot-and-fix-external-drives-when-not-detected-windows-10

 

[EarthDog]

I fixed it by assigning a letter to the drive. Either it had none before or it had been assigned one that conflicted with a drive letter already in use on the system:

Makes sense...need a drive letter/drive to be initialized to work in explorer!

Thanks for sharing!

 

[trents]

What's odd is that in all the years I have been using external storage drives I've never run into this issue until recently . I think there may have been changes made to Windows 10 and 11 in the last few months via Microsoft updates that have affected how Windows dynamically assigns drive letters to external disk storage devices. I have been using that 2TB WD Passport Ultra on many different systems for many years and never ran into this until a few months ago. No system ever failed to read it until now and I never had to reassign the drive letter.