External m.2 NVMe drives suddenly not recognized in Windows 11

Hi all, I know this post is months old. I have a solution that worked for me.

When you plug your NvMe external drive into your Windows11 PC and it doesn't recognize the drive for this. Disengage your drive from the PC. Then open the enclosure and take out the NvMe stick. Plug the enclosure back into your PC minus the NvMe stick. Wait a few minutes and disengage the enclosure. Put your NvMe stick back into the enclosure and then plug it back into your PC. Windows should read the drive now. Worked for me with two enclosures. After googling this I understand why this works. Windows11 reads the enclosure to initialize the drive but not when it has the NvMe stick in the actual drive.

I have a similar problem with an IcyBox enclosure with a M.2 NVMe 2TB SSD connecting to a new desktop PC running Windows 11 24H2 fully updated. On a couple of occasions just the enclosure has shown in Windows 11 but hasn't been accessible. In device management only the enclosure shows and is shown as working properly. On most occasions it doesn't show at all in Windows 11. Occasionally it has shown in Disk Management but with no information about the SSD, I have tried all 3 USB3 ports with same result. On an older Windows 10 laptop It showed up straight away. I was able to format the SSD as NTFS there and was able to read and write to the SSD. This looks to me like a very long standing bug in Windows 11. The driver Windows insists is the best for this hardware is dated 2006. I have had no problems with a 4TB external USB3 HDD which is used for backup which is connected to the PC.

Hi,

Do the drives show up in the Device Manager?

Hi Geoff,

I had the same problem with my external SSD drive which worked well for ages then suddenly had no drive letter and wanted to be initialised, I received error of "incorrect function" when I tried initialising. I then tried partion management tools unsuccessfully.

I fixed this problem by opening the enclosure and found I had not inserted the drive correctly and it had moved slightly.

I reinserted and tucked the pc board into the post and it is now working and all my data is still there.

Sometimes you get lucky

Hello everyone,

I'm facing a technical issue that's been quite the puzzle, and I'm hoping to get some guidance from this community.

Here's the situation: I have the same issue as him. I've got a few devices in my setup - 2 Alienware laptops, a Microsoft Surface Studio Laptop, a custom desktop with a 13900k processor, all running Windows 11 Pro Workstation Edition 23H2, and also an M1 MacBook Pro.

But here's the challenge: my external drive behaves perfectly fine with my MacBook Pro, but when I connect it to any of my Windows devices, things get messy. I keep hearing the "disconnect a device" sound, and the drive heats up way more than it should.

I've tried a bunch of troubleshooting steps:

1. Swapped out different cables, both USB-C to USB-C and USB-A to USB.
2. Updated drivers manually and with software, but only managed to find a driver update for the touchpad on one laptop.
3. Attempted to clean the disk using diskpart and ran chk disk, but encountered errors like "ChkDSK cannot open volume for direct access" and "Parameter is incorrect on external Hard Drive."
4. Rolled back updates, but no luck there.
5. Ran SFC scanNow and tried DISM in various ways, but still hitting roadblocks.

I'm kind of at my wit's end here. Any suggestions on what else I could try? Your input would be greatly appreciated!