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Hello everyone,
I'm trying to connect an external SSD drive using USB, however it doesn't show up in the file explorer. When I plug it in, Windows displays it with the correct name in the little menu in the taskbar and offers me to eject it. In the Device Manager it's listed under Disk drives, not Universal Serial Bus controllers, I've tried uninstalling it from there already, that didn't help. I've had no luck with the Disk Management tool either. It shows it as a basic disk, and is online, but I can't assign it a drive letter, that option is greyed out. When I inspect it's properties, it's located at Bus Number 0, Target Id 0, LUN 0 (I don't know if that's odd just wanted to include the information). The disk itself seems to have two partitions (EFI system and primary) but there's also 129mb of not allocated memory. I've also adjusted the USB Root Hub Power Controls, didn't help either. I've tried using different USB ports too, which didn't help either. I've tried going through various disk repair/health commands using the command prompt already. The SSD itself shouldn't be bad, I got it from a friend that used it the same day and it worked for him, I've also had the same problem with another SSD before but assumed it was just a bad SSD before, but now that I've got the same problem again, I'm suspecting there's something wrong on my end.
Many thanks!
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Hi Julian,
Thank you for that information.
That drive is definitely not formatted on a Mac, it would look totally different, someone has wiped that rive, there is no data on it to recover.
My opinion is someone did swap the drive in that casing and the only thing that can be done with that drive is to wipe it in Command Prompt - Diskpart to remove the partitions and then create one large partition on that drive.
Hey Dave,
thank you for the swift response! As to your questions, yeah I need to keep the data. As to your second question, I highly doubt it. It's a WD My Passport drive. I will attach the screenshot below.
Many thanks!
Hey Dave,
I can't say with certainty if this drive was swapped into the casing, but the person I got it from isn't very Tech savy and uses a Mac, so I don't think that's what happened. I've also tried using this drive on another computer, to no avail. Here is the screenshot.
Cheers, Julian
Hi Julian,
Thank you for the screenshot, I presume you are referring to the bottom drive (Disk 2)
1
That drive was definitely used as a System drive, it contains an EFI (boot) partition, the old C drive partition and the space for a Recovery partition, are you sure no-one replaced/swapped the drive inside that USB casing?
2
The old C drive partition looks like it has been erased, it had 931GB free of 931GB total.
3
Right click that large 931GB partition, please provide a screenshot of the resulting menu, so I can see the options available on that menu.
Hi Julian,
I am Dave, I will help you with this.
1
Is there data on that drive you want to keep?
2
If there is an EFI partition on that drive, that used to be a Windows system drive that was removed from a PC, is that correct?
3
Please provide a screenshot of that drive in Disk Management, ensuring that drive is visible in the bottom pane
